Dr. Flores is currently working on two projects. The first is his book manuscript, tentatively titled Becoming HIV-Negative (under contract with the University of Minnesota Press), based on his interdisciplinary dissertation research in central Ohio. He investigates the relationship between a newly introduced biomedical HIV prevention medication known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (“PrEP”) and its effects on minoritized communities in local, everyday settings. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in a mid-sized Midwestern city, his work illustrates how the material, political, and affective work that HIV prevention technologies are leveraged for manifest and emerge from contested histories of racialization and sexualization. Additionally, Dr. Flores attends to PrEP’s proliferation in people’s lives and to the reconfiguration of what types of intimacy, pleasure, and affective registers are made available through HIV prevention work.  

Dr. Flores is a co-Principal Investigator on an Ohio State University campus-wide grant (2020-21) titled the Transformative Access Project (TAP). The aim of TAP is to re-imagine “access” as a collective and deliberate process that centers race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. He is leading the efforts to have their work compiled and published.