Teaching Fellows

Agnes Mondragón’s research explores the forms of knowledge production and circulation that emerge in contexts of warfare and how they are constitutive of political authority. Her book project, tentatively entitled Mediations of War: Statehood, Criminality, and the Politics of Knowledge in Mexico, delves into the forms of epistemic murk surrounding Mexico’s “war on drug trafficking” and the discursive practices emerging from them. Rather than a militarized confrontation between the state and criminal organizations, it frames the drug war as a conceptual struggle over the shape that these two entities have taken in a context of generalized violence. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Mexico City, it analyzes how Mexico’s national publics render the “war on drug trafficking” intelligible by attending to the symptomatic traces that haunt its violence. 

Her second project ethnographically examines the fallout and feminist responses to the recent increase in gendered violence in Mexico. It explores how anti-violence feminist activists counter gender-based violence by, among other things, mobilizing the semiotic and affective dimensions of its representation—such as transforming the depicted dead feminine body from a weapon of terror into a tool of resistance. She is also interested in the role of discourse in the emerging forms of populist politics in Mexico. Mondragón holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.