Javier Rivera is a PhD Candidate at USC Annenberg. His research interests include: US Latinx media and popular culture, embodiment and performance, aesthetics, affect, and psychoanalysis. His dissertation "Ambivalent Attachments: The Cringeworthiness of US Latinidad and the Crisis of In/Coherence," considers the affective landscape of what makes objects of Latinx popular culture cringeworthy. The inquiry itself is not interested in justifying why an object of Latinx popular culture is cringeworthy, rather, it considers the emotional choreography at the scene of cringe as structured by assimilation, diaspora, migration, and coloniality to investigate the ambivalence that defines the crisis of contemporary US Latinx subjectivity. From "no sabo kids," to gentrification narratives and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the project considers how desires for coherence and the readings of the resulting performances as failures structure and embarrassment-by-proxy popularly known as "cringe."

He has a recently published article in the Journal of Popular Music Studies that considers the affect of anticipatory anxiety in the sonic aesthetics of musician and performance artist Arca.

Before arriving at USC he completed an MA in Mexican American and Latina/o studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to his MA, Rivera earned a BA in women's and gender studies and a BS in microbiology also from the University of Texas at Austin.