Agnes Mondragón’s research engages with the mass mediation and collective sense-making around contemporary forms of warfare. Her dissertation analyzes how Mexico’s “war on drug trafficking”—a nationwide military deployment to combat the drug trade that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives—is articulated in representations and imaginations in the public sphere. It explores how such imaginaries are shaped through semiotic operations, forms of spectacle and erasure, and collective memories of violence, focusing on how they are constructed conceptually, affectively, and morally. It analyzes how the populist appeal of the war’s protagonists—drug traffickers, the Mexican state, and victims—interact in this representational ecology.