About

Iván Chaar López is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies within the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic interests encompass Digital Studies, Ethnic Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Science & Technology Studies. His research focuses on borderlands, the history of technology—particularly electronics and computing—and imperial formations. He explores information infrastructures and Latina/o lifeworlds and knowledge production, contributing to understanding racial formation and the socio-political dynamics of these areas.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Science
• Epistemology
• Mathematics
• Gender studies
• History
• Psychology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Uncivil Technoscience

  2025-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter traces the collaborations between the American Border Patrol, defense contractors, and the US federal government in the articulation of a border regime premised on a gradually growing, persistent technocreep—of data capture and processing, and bodily apprehension, displacement, and elimination. These collaborations take place through a citizen science framework that position citizens as caring for the US nation all the while targeting migrants. The chapter sheds light on the limitations of citizen science, particularly in relation to citizenship and sovereignty, and questions its unanimous acceptance as a democratizing endeavor by examining its uncivil technopolitics in the exercise of racial violence.

  PublisherDOI

• 2. Uncivil Technoscience: Anti-immigration and Citizen Science in Boundary Making

  2025-05-04 · 8 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Uncivil Technoscience:

  2025-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Artificial Intelligence, Microwork, and the Racial Politics of Care

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • History

  Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Cybernetic Border

  2024-02-23 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In The Cybernetic Border, Iván Chaar López argues that the settler US nation requires the production and targeting of a racialized enemy that threatens the empire. The cybernetic border is organized through practices of data capture, storage, processing, circulation, and communication that police bodies and constitute the nation as a bounded, territorial space. Chaar López historicizes the US government's use of border enforcement technologies on Mexicans, Arabs, and Muslims from the mid-twentieth century to the present, showing how data systems are presented as solutions to unauthorized border crossing. Contrary to enduring fantasies of the purported neutrality of drones, smart walls, artificial intelligence, and biometric technologies, the cybernetic border represents the consolidation of calculation and automation in the exercise of racialized violence. Chaar López draws on corporate, military, and government records, promotional documents and films, technical reports, news reporting, surveillance footage, and activist and artist practices. These materials reveal how logics of enmity are embedded into information infrastructures that shape border control and modern sovereignty.

  PublisherDOI

• 13 Artificial Intelligence, Microwork, and the Racial Politics of Care

  2024-05-24

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Cybernetic Border

  2024-03-18 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In The Cybernetic Border , Iván Chaar López argues that the settler US nation requires the production and targeting of a racialized enemy that threatens the empire. The cybernetic border is organized through practices of data capture, storage, processing, circulation, and communication that police bodies and constitute the nation as a bounded, territorial space. Chaar López historicizes the US government’s use of border enforcement technologies on Mexicans, Arabs, and Muslims from the mid-twentieth century to the present, showing how data systems are presented as solutions to unauthorized border crossing. Contrary to enduring fantasies of the purported neutrality of drones, smart walls, artificial intelligence, and biometric technologies, the cybernetic border represents the consolidation of calculation and automation in the exercise of racialized violence. Chaar López draws on corporate, military, and government records, promotional documents and films, technical reports, news reporting, surveillance footage, and activist and artist practices. These materials reveal how logics of enmity are embedded into information infrastructures that shape border control and modern sovereignty.

  PublisherDOI

• The Cybernetic Border

  2024-02-23 · 24 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Artificial Intelligence, Microwork, and the Racial Politics of Care

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Unsettled borders: the militarized science of surveillance on sacred Indigenous land

  Postcolonial Studies · 2023-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 For more on environmental media theory and life as mediation see: Rafico Ruiz, Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Frontier, Duke University Press, 2021; Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, MIT Press, 2012.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Victoria Sánchez-Martín

  3 shared

• Sareeta Amrute

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, American Culture

  University of Michigan

  2018

• Master of Arts in History, History

  University of Puerto Rico

  2012

• Bachelor of Arts in History of the Americas, History

  University of Puerto Rico

  2007