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Northwestern School of Communication

Michael Anthony Turcios

(He/Him)
Mancosh Postdoctoral Fellow
Michael Anthony Turcios

Michael Anthony Turcios, Ph.D. is a Mancosh Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. Turcios specializes in nontheatrical cinemas, nontraditional material film cultures, and archival visual histories with attention to relational studies of race, anticolonial and decolonial projects, and liberation movements.

He is at work on his book, Relational Displacements, which examines visual and literary culture of the 1960s and 1970s produced in the Chicana/o barrios of East Los Angeles and the Arab banlieues of Paris, France that address how displacement is a destabilizing force sanctioned via deportation, police violence, urban containment, and disappearances of community members. His second book project, historicizes and spatializes the film and media of Indigenous, Black, and Arab displaced persons in the Americas and the Indian Ocean with a focus on worldmaking possibilities in liminal spaces as a survival response to human rights abuse and xenophobia.

A first-generation scholar from a working-class background, he especially mentors students from underrepresented backgrounds and experiences.

Michael Anthony Turcios researches non-traditional and ephemeral film cultures with specializations in racial, anti-colonial, and resistance histories in order to historicize how racialized communities forge spaces in non-mainstream media to contest settler-colonial logics while building coalitions and solidarities with oppressed groups across the world.

Publications

  • Decolonial Expressions in Non-theatrical Films of 1970s East Los Angeles,” Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas 19.1 (Fall 2022): 19-34.
  • “The Chicano Moving Image on Walls and Media Activism,” Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era. Edited by Mario Garcia and Ellen McCracken, 218-235. University of Arizona Press, 2021.
  • “Bearing Witness to Ecocide: Contagious Imperial Infrastructures at the Borderlands of Mexico and Palestine.” Spectator 39.1 (Spring 2019): 36-44.