Biography

Juan Herrera (PhD, UC Berkeley, 2013) is an Assistant Professor with research interests in race, social movements, queer of color critique, spatial theory, and women of color feminisms. He teaches courses on space and power, race, Latinx geographies, and migration. He is a proud first generation scholar committed to studying and imagining a more spatially just world.

His teaching and research examines the spatial imperatives to social justice struggles. His first book, Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space (Duke University Press 2021) examines how social movements mobilize to make changes in actually-existing places. The book details how movements produce landscapes shaped out of the reconfiguration of social relations and the meeting of multiple historical trajectories—down to the very materiality of transformations in the built environment. Utilizing rich oral histories, ethnography, and meticulous archival research, it details how movements transform places, route places to other regions, and mobilize to create an egalitarian futurity.

His next book focuses on an intersectional and relational analysis of queer of color geographies in Los Angeles. The book questions what it means to conceptualize intersectionality through a spatial framework. What are the politics of building intersectional spaces? What identities, institutional formations, and geographical locations are privileged (and/or rendered invisible) in the making of intersectional spaces and movements? The project probes the politics in the making of queer of color geographies.