Hi! I’m Fernanda Soria, a Mexican scholar and PhD candidate in Communication at USC Annenberg, where I’m also pursuing a graduate certificate in Visual Studies and Gender and Sexuality. My research sits at the intersection of critical forensic studies, legal anthropology, media theory, and feminist scholarship. I study feminicidal violence and forced human disappearance in Mexico and Latin America, asking how visual, legal, and scientific regimes co-construct the “evidence” of gendered killings and human disappearance. 

Through a focus on bones, morgues, graves, and archives, I explore how the Mexican state’s carceral and necropolitical apparatus both erases and disciplines the dead, the living and the thanato-citizens. I’m particularly interested in counter-forensic practices, like those of searching mothers and citizen investigators, who challenge state-sanctioned narratives and produce alternate archives of grief, resistance, and care. Media plays a central role in my work—as both a material witness to violence and a space where forensic poetics, affective testimony, and evidentiary aesthetics unfold.

Drawing from trauma studies, forensic aesthetics, and theories of infrapolitics, I trace how techno-visual cultures—including photography, mapping, and data visualizations—do not simply document violence, but actively shape what becomes legible as truth, evidence, or justice. I’m also interested in the epistemic role of literary fiction and storytelling as archives of the unspeakable—where institutional recognition fails, and the forensic becomes a site of imagination and refusal. 

Previously, I earned an M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and a B.A. in International Relations from UDLAP. My work has been supported by the AAUW, the Visual Studies Research Institute, and the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONAHCYT), and I’ve presented at ICA, the Lisbon Winter School, and the Cultural Studies Association. 

Outside of research, I care deeply about teaching, mentorship, and building spaces for collective inquiry. And I never miss a chance to walk the beach with my PhDog Pimienta.