In the News:
- CSDE Welcomes 3 New Affiliates (09/04/2025)
José Alavez's research brings together critical cartography, digital humanities, pluriversal design principles, and Global South approaches to transnationalism, exile, and diaspora. He focuses on co-creating collaborative and creative mapping practices and representations that reveal the ongoing and multiscalar geographies of migration across the Americas. Prior to joining the University of Washington, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's (UIUC) Healthy Regions and Policies Lab (HEROP), where he co-led the development of a community-focused data visualization toolkit on social determinants of health grounded in human-centered design and design justice principles. His postdoctoral work also included co-creating workshops alongside community and grassroots organizations to co-design ChiVes, a dashboard for environmental justice in Chicago. Additionally, he co-produced in-depth interviews for the U.S. COVID Atlas as a means to humanize and complement its quantitative data. José holds a Ph.D. from Concordia University's (Montreal) Geography, Planning, and Environment Department. For his doctoral dissertation, he employed deep mapping methodologies to study the stories of individuals who endured the death of a loved one in the context of migration. His work illustrated how deep maps, through multiple analytical and artistic displays, reveal that death in the context of migration is not the end of a story, but the beginning and extension of many others. He also holds a Master's degree in Geomatics from CONACYT's Research Center of Geospatial Information and a BA in Human Geography from the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City.