Sara Mckinnon

McKinnon is Professor of Rhetoric, Politics & Culture in the Department of Communication Arts, and Faculty Director of Latin American, Caribbean & Iberian Studies. She co-chairs UW-Madison’s Human Rights Program and has affiliations in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Chicanx & Latinx Studies. Her current research dynamics of human migration in Latin American and examines foreign policy relations and rhetorics in a transnational era, considering as case studies collaborations between the United States, Mexico, and Central American countries since the 1980s to address regional issues such as drug trafficking, corruption, and violence. She also leads a collaborative project to expand the legal information about US immigration and refugee programs and legal counsel available to migrants throughout Latin America as they consider safe options for movement and resettlement.

You can find more information about this project at https://migrationamericas.commarts.wisc.edu/

McKinnon has published three books, Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State University Press, 2016) and Foreign Policy Rhetorics in the Global Era: Concepts and Case Studies (Michigan State University Press, 2024) and has authored over thirty peer-reviewed research articles.

Professor McKinnon regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in communication and human behavior, social movements and justice, migration and refugee studies, gender and communication, intercultural communication, and conflict studies, and qualitative and text-based research methods. She has won several teaching and mentorship awards for her work with underrepresented and first-generation students, including the 2015 University of Wisconsin-Madison Undergraduate Mentor Award and the 2019 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. McKinnon focuses on creating impactful, community-engaged learning experiences for her students. She teaches a class where bilingual students volunteer as interpreters at a pro bono immigration law clinic. Many students are heritage Spanish speakers and first-generation who want to support immigrant communities. She has organized trips for immigration law students to Mexico and Colombia to deepen their understanding of migration and displacement in Latin America. She is interested in using study abroad to create learning opportunities for underrepresented and first-generation college students.