Wilfredo Flores (he/him/his)

PhD Candidate

Michigan State University

Description of Work:

I am a rhetoric and writing researcher who uses qualitative methods to understand how internet-based cultural communities make meaning and share knowledge about their health. My research and community organizing constellates across technical and professional communication, digital/cultural/material rhetorics, health and medical rhetorics/literacies, and Black/Indigenous science, technology, and medicine studies.

As a community-engaged scholar, I am especially attuned to issues of health and disability justice, technological colonialism, and how queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color survive and thrive. I am a founding member of and current organizer in Queer Medicine, a grassroots coalition of queers taking their health into their own hands that operates in and around Lansing, MI, through which I have worked with the Michigan Public Health Institute, the Ingham County Health Department, and the Salus Center.

My current manuscript projects focus on community-specific health literacies of HIV/AIDS on social media and attuning communication design for such knowledges, Indigenous science/cosmologies as digital rhetorical praxis, and ethical community-engaged research methodologies. I am also planning a book project that examines three case studies of queer and trans BIPOC digital rhetoric practices to outline a community-based, non-clinical framework of health literacy.

Contact: floreswi@msu.edu | http://www.wilfredoflores.com | @willflowers (Twitter)