María Torres

María Torres is a postdoctoral research fellow in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. Their dissertation and current book project offer an alternate history of forensics grounded in direct action, technological disobedience and contestational biology in the context of forced disappearance in Mexico. Drawing on long-term collaboration with Buscadora searching groups, human rights advocators and local scientists, María documents how grassroots and counter-forensic practices open a space to attend to overlapping systems of political and environmental violence in a landscape of neoliberal dispossession. Their research is embedded in a commitment to social engagement, which they have pursued through community-based research, collaborative writing, multimedia art projects and activist work in both the field and the classroom.

María holds a PhD in Philosophical and Social Studies of Science and Technology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the inter-institutional program offered jointly by Universidad Complutense, Autonomous University, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofìa. Their key research questions have remained constant throughout this multidisciplinary trajectory and relate to the ethics and politics of cultural representations of science and technology, with a particular emphasis on their intersections with social movements and feminist materialisms in Latin America.