My name is D. Alex Piña (she/her/ella) and I am a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine in the department of Global & International Studies (emphasis in Critical Theory).

I am a critical feminist geographer interested in the shifting cultural and environmental landscapes of queer counterpublics; the political, libidinal economy of tourism; transnational social movements, performativity, and affect; feminist and transfeminist protest culture in Latin America.

Before beginning my academic career, I worked as a hairdresser for a decade. In that role, I learned to think like an ethnographer, oral historian, fabulist, and critical geographer in everyday life. As I held space for folks to explore the possibilities of their identities, to trouble racialized beauty standards and hegemonic gender norms, I learned that this process could also provoke a confrontation with messy histories of racial and sexual oppression. For this reason, who I am, who I’ve been, what interests me now, and what I hope to explore as a scholar and educator have everything to do with aesthetic practices, embodiment, being out of step, and out of time.