Brenda Garcia

Brenda Gisela Garcia is a scholar, writer, and educator whose research interests include surveillance technologies and practices, securitization, and everyday understandings of the law.  Their training in sociocultural anthropology, legal humanities, science and technology studies and Latino Studies remain central to their current teaching and research. Their current book project examines how security infrastructures in Mexico City impose governance through normative logics of worth, value, and debt while asserting normative personhood and justifying the suffering of deviant populations.

• 2024 PhD Sociocultural Anthropology and minor in Latina/o Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 2012 B.A. (Honors) in Anthropology with distinction and minor in Spanish, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada.

• Latin America Law and Society (University of Massachusetts Amherst Spring 2025)
• International Surveillance Technology (University of Massachusetts Amherst , Spring 2025)
• Law and Gender (University of Massachusetts Amherst Fall 2024)
• Law, Crime and Society (University of Massachusetts Amherst Fall 2024, Spring 2025)
• Interdisciplinary Legal Studies (University of Massachusetts Amherst Fall 2024)
• Anthropology of Science and Technology (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Fall 2022, Fall 2023)
• Latinx Ethnography (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Spring 2024)

• Garcia, Brenda Gisela. "The art of war and the militarization of mestizaje." Journal for the Anthropology of North America 26, no. 1-2 (2023): 54-56.
• Garcia, Brenda Gisela. “The Emergence of Necrosecurity: On the Extra-Legality of the Rule of Law and the Death of the Willful Subject.” in Necropower in North America: The Legal Spatialization Of Disposability And Lucrative Death edited by Ariadna Estevez (London, Palgrave McMillan, 2021) Pp. 153-173.