Dr. Ramón Resendiz is a Chicanx documentary filmmaker and media anthropologist from the south Texas U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He holds a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University where his research interrogates the material and imaginary intersections of national borders, memory, visual culture, systemic violence, and settler colonialism. His dissertation, Landscapes of Violence: Documentary Media, Countervisualities, and Archival Resistance on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, investigates the historic violence, erasures, and undocumentation of critical Latinx Indigeneities in the national constructions of Texas, Mexico, and the U.S.

Statement: “The IAS Visualizing Abolition Dissertation Workshop at UCSC was truly a liberating and transformative experience for myself and my research. The workshop showed me that it’s indeed necessary and possible to imagine abolitionist and decolonial futures, and to approach research and scholarship through a robust politics of care and solidarity. I am grateful to the organizers and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences for creating such a special space, an for helping me think through the many theoretical intersections between abolitionism, decolonization, justice, and the visual. It was exactly what I needed at the tail end of my Ph.D.”