The Raah Lab hosted Feng-Mei Heberer and Juan Llamas-Rodriguez on Feb 1 2024 for a conversation about their recently published books - Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism and Border Tunnels: A Media theory of the US-Mexico Underground, The conversation focused on mediation, borders and the need to challenge hegemonic visualities. They also provided helpful tips for grad students on conceptualizing and writing their first manuscripts. Dr. Masha Salazkina, Dr. Ishita Tiwary and Nildeep Paul were the respondents.

Feng-Mei Heberer’s Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism aims to investigate the relations between representation and racial justice through an engagement with an archive of queer, feminist activist videos by Asian filmmakers situated in Germany, Taiwan, United States and Spain. Analyzing video texts by Hito Steyerl, Ming Wong, Miko Cevereza, Kristina Wong’s performance art, experimental video diaries by migrant workers and documentaries by Taiwan International Workers Association, the book provides a critique of neoliberalism’s demand of accessible visibility of Asians, situating it within digital video’s position as exemplary on demand technology.

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez’s Border Tunnels: A Media theory of the US-Mexico Underground analyzes a range of media and technologies, including cable news, reality television, video games and speculative design to uncover their implicit positions on the geopolitics of the US-Mexico border. Taking the tunnels between US and Mexico as a medium for thinking infrastructurally of the border, the book engages with media texts, industrial and technological practices to examine the underlying logics of racialization and securitization of the borderlands and the physical and conceptual affordances provided by tunnels to understand a world of borders.

Feng-Mei Heberer

Bio: Feng-Mei Heberer is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on questions of labor, transnational migration, Asian diaspora, at the confluence of queer studies, feminist studies and critical area studies. Her work has appeared in Sexualities, Camera Obscura, The Autobiographical Turn in German Documentary and Experimental Film, and Asian Video Cultures, among others.

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez

Bio: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on media cultures, digital technologies, border studies, infrastructure studies and Latin American media. His work has appeared in the journals Social Text, Feminist Media Histories, Television & New Media, Lateral, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Popular Communication and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, as well as several edited collections. He is a member of the Global Internet TV Consortium, a network of media scholars studying internet-distributed screen content, and co-lead of The Migrant Steps Project, a public humanities initiative that prompts walking reflections through engagement with curated narratives about migration.