Dr. Lisa Marie Cacho
Department of Latina/Latino Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1207 W. Oregon Street, M/C 136
Urbana, IL 61801
Telephone: (217)265-0338
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
http://www.lls.illinois.edu/people/lcacho
Lisa Cacho's work demonstrates how race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and legality work interdependently to assign human value and to render relations of inequality normative, natural, and obvious in both dominant and oppositional discourses. To understand how the rhetoric and discourse of value are both institutionalized and popularized to devastating effect, she analyzes a range of sources, such as ballot measures ascribing “illegality” to persons, legal provisions targeting “criminal aliens,” court documents evaluating degrees of “guilt,” and related media accounts that manage and make sense of racial contradictions. Her book, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (NYU press, 2012) examines the ways in which representations of race and race relations mediate how we affectively and intellectually apprehend criminal justice and civil/human rights.