Research Justice at the Intersections

Patrick D. Anderson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Digital Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan where he teaches courses in applied ethics, digital technologies, and social-political philosophy. Dr. Anderson’s current research focuses on two areas: cypherpunk ethics and digital coloniality. In his work on cypherpunk ethics, he explores the implications of the cypherpunk movement’s cryptography activism for ethical questions regarding privacy, surveillance, whistleblowing, journalism, and intellectual property. In his work on digital clonality, he draws upon the tradition of Africana anticolonialism, bringing to light the unacknowledged neocolonialism of surveillance, propaganda, weaponized drones, and mass incarceration.

Research: Anderson’s current research project is a book manuscript entitled The Phallus and the Ogre: The Social and Political Philosophy of Eldridge Cleaver. With chapters on race/gender theory, internal colonialism, class, technology, culture, and whiteness, the book draws upon extensive archival research to reinterpret a significant thinker and public intellectual of the twentieth century.

Lisa Arellano is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Colby College. Her research and teaching focus on comparative social movements, critical historiography and violence studies.

Research: Arellano’s current book manuscript, Disarming Imagination: Violence and the American Political Left, contains research on high profile rape revenge cases, anti-violence activism, militant political movements, and dis/utopian political literature. Her first book, Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Community, Nation and Narrative, was published by Temple University Press in July 2012. She is co-editor, with Amanda Frisken and Erica Ball, of the fall 2016 issue of the Radical History Review entitled “Reconsidering Gender, Violence and the State.”

Doria E. Charlson recently earned her PhD in Theatre Arts & Performance Studies at Brown University. Her current research resides at the intersections of dance studies, critical race theory, performance historiography, and political economy. She is an educator who has taught theatre and performance theory, studio-based explorations of performance and practice, and performance historiography.

Research: Charlson’s book project, Consuming Crises: Migrant Labor, Spectacle, and Precarity in the 20th Century,considers how crises of capitalism become spectacularized through the laboring body. This project draws from dance studies, performance historiography, and critical theory to trace both how crises, and their responses, migrate across sites and industries and how bodily comportment becomes critical to the framing and management of said disruptions. Broadly, she is interested in investigating how people move, work, and breathe under capitalism. Doria hopes this research can help us reimagine our collective futures in the age of cascading societal, ecological, economic, and labor crises.

Alexandra Havrylyshyn is an interdisciplinary law and society scholar. She completed her PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy and her juris doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on slavery, the legal profession, and access to justice.

Research: Havrylyshyn’s book project, Crossing Freedom’s Line: How Louisiana Destroyed Free Soil, explains why and how certain women and girls of African descent successfully sued for their freedom in antebellum New Orleans, where state law generally denied legal standing to enslaved people.  This project seeks to engage social justice activists as well as historians of law, slavery, and gender. Alexandra’s work has been supported by the American Association of University Women, and appears or is forthcoming in California Legal History, Canada’s Legal Past, and the William & Mary Quarterly.

Sona Kazemi was the postdoctoral researcher, from 2018 to 2020, of Migration Studies, Disability Studies, and Medical Humanities, as well as the project coordinator for a digital humanities archive at the Ohio State University. Her articles and book reviews have appeared inthe Journal of Critical Educational Policy Studies, Canadian Women’s Studies, a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies entitled “Survivals, Ruptures, Resiliences,” Critical Disability Discourse Journal, Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She is the Society for Disability Studies’ 2018 recipient of the honorable mention for the Irving K. Zola Award for emerging scholars in Disability Studies. She is currently the Associate Editor for Global Ideas for the Review of Disability Studies, an International Journal.

Research: Kazemi’s current project concerns traumatized Yazidi refugees in diaspora and their disability consciousness as survivors of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the mental health of Iranian and Kurdish refugees in the United States who are the survivors of state terror, Iranian women survivors of acid attack and their disability and feminist consciousness, and punitive limb amputation in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Henry S. Kuo is visiting assistant professor of theology and ethics at Greensboro College in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he teaches courses in religion and ethics. He has published on subjects in theology, history, and applied ethics in journals such as the Journal of Religion and Business Ethics, Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology, Religions, and Moral Philosophy and Politics. Henry’s current research analyzes the history of Reformed catholicity as a double bind.

Research: Kuo’s current project aims to excavate the history of Christianity in the Reformed tradition to demonstrate how that Reformed catholicity takes on various forms of resistance. Yet, this self-understanding of catholicity presents double binds, often resulting in dynamics of resistances and counter-resistances against social, political, and cultural values and positions. He strives to uncover how Christian identities and public resistances contain spaces of ambiguities, generating complex double bind situations in the process. At the same time, however, these complicated dynamics convey opportunities for communities to closely analyze pertinent problems, engage issues and arguments more perspicaciously, and effectively strategize speech-acts of defiance.

Anna Lee Mraz Bartra teaches courses on Feminism, Visual Sociology and Technologies of Information and Communication and is a temporary researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT). She founded and directed Disidentas a feminist multimedia research project at the Sociology Department at UNAM. She is a co-editor of Sociology with Audiovisual Media published in Mexico (2019) and is author of two bilingual children's storybooks for Latinx children living in the Bay Area.

Research: Mraz Bartra studies the use of technologies of information and communication by Latinx underserved women in the San Francisco Bay Area. The central point of her study is to understand both how low-income women in the Silicon Valley cope with everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic and what transformation technologies bring about in their lives. This research will be based on a multidisciplinary methodology, from visual sociology to focus groups, surveys, and in-depth interviews with the women and children in Redwood City and other unincorporated areas.

Lorena Muñoz is an urban/cultural geographer at Mills College whose research focuses on the intersections of place, space, gender, sexuality, health and race. Her transdisciplinary research agenda has been focused on the production of Latinx worldmakings, particularly in the areas the (in)formal economy and productive/transformative agency. In her different research projects, she calls for rethinking the ‘informal’ economy in ways that disrupt normative narratives that center ‘the economy’ as a unitary category. Instead, she argues that “the economy” consists of diverse, heterogeneous entangled economic processes, rather than categories that exclude, include, and define binary systems. In order to theoretically understand how these spaces and places are produced, she looks towards what she calls “queering economies”; that is, rethinking the economy by understanding heterogeneous economic processes as queer, entangled, and relational.

Research: Muñoz’s current book manuscript is about Latinx Workmakings as blueprints for healthier urban futures for peoples of color.

Dana Chalupa Young is an assistant adjunct professor in the Sociology Program at Mills College. She specializes in Latinx Studies and has developed an intersectional analysis in her research to examine the racial and ethnic identities among Peruvian, Colombian, and Argentinian immigrants as well as their assimilation in Ohio.

Research:Chalupa Young’s current project explores the college attainment rates, racial and ethnic identities, experiences of microaggressions, and mental health of Latinx college students.

Kevin D. Thomas currently serves as the Assistant Professor of Multicultural Branding at Marquette University. He specializes in using policy-relevant and community participatory action research methods to critically examine the relationship between marketing, consumption practices, and notions of self and community. He is particularly interested in how identity markers such as race, gender, class, and sexuality are represented in marketing and experienced in the marketplace. His research is featured in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Consumption Markets & Culture, among others. He is co-editor of Race in the Marketplace: Crossing Critical Boundaries (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). He is co- founder of Food for Black Thought, the Black Media Council, and the Race in the Marketplace Research Network.

Research: Thomas’s current research brings together a consumption perspective and philosophical investigations and brings them to bear on his inquiry into the legitimacy and authenticity of a transracial identity. Analyzing the Rachel Dolezal controversy, he explores how the media assigns meaning to race and trans-identities and how identities are legitimized through embodied practices. His project’s goal is to produce knowledge on the historic, contemporary, and future interactions of race in the marketplace.

Dr. Natalee Kēhaulani Bauer (she/hers) is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar born in Honolulu and raised between/across Hawai’i and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an assistant adjunct professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and director of Native Student Recruitment and Retention at Mills College.

Bauer taught in public schools for eight years after receiving her BA from Mills in 1997. She later returned to Mills to complete a master’s degree in English and American Literature in 2007. After again returning to public education in 2007, she shifted her scholarly focus from literature to social and cultural studies in education, beginning a doctoral program at UC Berkeley as a chancellor’s fellow from 2010–2015.

Her doctoral dissertation titled, “(En)gendering Whiteness: A Historical Analysis of White Womanhood, Colonial Anxieties, and ‘Tender Violence’ in US Schools,” uses a historical lens to analyze the trope of white female teachers (who constitute around 80 percent of the profession) as benevolent mothers/saviors in communities of color, finding its discursive roots in the early 19th-century missionary project and US imperial expansion.

Dr. Angela DosAlmas just completed a stint as a STEM education researcher for the NSF S-STEM Smart Energy Scholars Program with the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at Binghamton University in New York. Prior to joining the CLT, Dr. DosAlmas was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, working to support both the integration of the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) Framework and Japanese Lesson Study, and the use of TRU-Lesson Study as a form of instructional improvement adoptable for the US context. Broadly, Dr. DosAlmas’ work focuses on the teaching and learning needs of marginalized students and on making mathematics broadly accessible.

Dr. DosAlmas’ dissertation research used a post-structuralist perspective of identity and an amalgamation of critical race theories, women of color theories, and queer theories to: 1) interrogate grand narratives that serve to mark identities historically, socially, culturally, and politically to such a degree that certain identities are equated with intellectual and academic inferiority despite remarkable performance or significant accomplishments and, 2) investigate how these narratives impacted students’ relationships with mathematics.

Dr. DosAlmas has held lecturer/adjunct faculty positions at Mills College, Holy Names University, and UC Berkeley in both education and mathematics departments.

Dr. Clifford H. Lee is an associate professor and program director of the Single Subject Teacher Education Program at Mills College. He was a founding teacher of Life Academy in the Oakland Unified School District where he earned his National Board Certification in English Language Arts in 2007. His research centers on teaching and learning amongst urban youth of color at the intersections of critical pedagogy/literacy, computational thinking, multiliteracies, and ethnic studies.

He has also been highly vested in research at YR Media (formerly Youth Radio) in downtown Oakland, a Peabody Award-winning national network of young journalists and artists, where he has been engaged in inquiry on critical computational literacy since 2014. He also enjoys cooking, gardening, listening to reggae/dancehall, building community in Oakland, and traveling to new places with his family.

Dr. Mario Hernandez is an assistant professor in the Sociology Program at Mills. He completed his doctoral degree in sociology at The New School for Social Research in New York City and is an urban sociologist who specializes in the study of gentrification—a pressing issue for students and the sociological community today.

His research uses a critical analysis of race and class in order to situate the contemporary displacement of many communities of color in revitalizing neighborhoods within a larger context of race and class relations in American cities. His most recent research focuses on the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City.

Dr. Jimin Kim has actively researched and taught on issues of modern Korean history, especially the comfort women issue. She was the program director of the Asian Social Justice Program at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center, Queensborough Community College (a branch of City University of New York).

At the Asian Social Justice Program, while conducting research on the impact of the comfort women movement in the United States, she also has developed curriculum on comfort women for a special internship program for college students

She received her BA and MA in history from Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea) and PhD in Korean history from Columbia University. She specializes in modern Korean history and history of US-Korean-Japanese relations. She is currently conducting research on representations of Korea in American popular culture during WWII and the Korean War and postwar discourses on war crimes among Japan, Korea, and the United States.

Dr. Rigoberto Marquéz is lecturer and associate director of Academic Programs and Community Engaged Learning at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In this role, Dr. Marquéz is responsible for overseeing the mission and direction of the center’s family of undergraduate programs (Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American Studies, Jewish Studies, and Comparative Studies), their community engaged learning opportunities and undergraduate fellowship programs.

As a scholar-activist, Dr. Marquéz’s research and community work focuses on understanding the dynamic roles family and community can play in the lives of queer Latina/o(x) youth and the implications that has for theory, policy, practice, and action.

His teaching and research interests include critical theories of race and sexuality, queer youth of color, Latina/o youth, law and policy, social justice pedagogies, and community-based research methodologies. Currently, Dr. Marquéz is working on a book manuscript titled “Queer Latininidad in Education: Engagement at the Intersections” for Teachers College Press.

Dr. Suzanne Schmidt is a writer, professor, parent, and organizer who teaches in the School of Liberal Arts at Saint Mary's College of California.

She recently published an article in the Migration and Development journal titled, “Precarious Craft: a Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis” and has a forthcoming book chapter titled "Craft as a Pedagogy of Hope" in Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats. Her research interests include contemporary do-it-yourself crafting narratives and the role of crafting labors in domestic fiction, multi-ethnic US literature, and community organizing.

Connecting her research interests in domesticity and gendered and racialized labor to community organizing, she works as the education organizer in support of domestic worker rights with Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network. In addition, as education director for the Social Justice Sewing Academy (SJSA), she consults on teaching and learning strategies for SJSA workshops and public programs. She taught drop-in sewing/ESL classes at Southwest Youth and Family Services in Seattle, Washington, while completing her MA and PhD at the University of Washington.

Dr. Dana E. Wright is an associate professor in the School of Education at Mills. Her research areas include curriculum theory and design, educational leadership, schooling in urban contexts, sociocultural theories of learning, and participatory action research with young people.

She has consistently had papers accepted to the innovative annual conference of the American Educational Research Association and has five peer-reviewed publications in highly distinguished journals in the field of education.

Her book, Active Learning: Social Justice Education and Participatory Action Research, presents an examination of innovative curricula and teaching strategies and discusses implications for school transformation, curriculum, and educational policy.

Dr. Jane H. Yamashiro is a sociologist whose comparative and transnational work on race and ethnicity, culture, globalization, migration, transnationalism, diaspora, and identity sits at the intersection of Asian American and Asian Studies. She has previously been based at the University of Southern California's Center for Japanese Religions and Culture and the University of California, Los Angeles' Asian American Studies Center.

She holds a BA from the University of California, San Diego and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa. Her book, Redefining Japaneseness: Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland, examines how Japanese Americans who were raised in the United States negotiate new discourses and assumptions about what it means to be “Japanese” as they live in Japan.

Dr. Yamashiro's current research project looks at Okinawan identity construction on the US continent, a place where the dominant racial formation does not distinguish between "Okinawan" and "Japanese." She examines how histories of Japanese imperialism and US militarism in Okinawa shape not only experiences in Okinawa but also the gendered international migration of Okinawans to the United States. She also investigates the varying processes through which an Okinawan diaspora has been constructed as sometimes part of and sometimes distinct from a Japanese diaspora.