Advisory Board
Dr. Charles R. Hale,
Dean of Social Sciences, UCSB
Dr. Charles R. Hale is the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences, UC Santa Barbara. Author of Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894-1987 (1994); and “Más que un indio…” Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala (2006); editor of Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics and Methods of Activist Scholarship (2008); co-editor (with Lynn Stephen) of Otros Saberes: Collaborative Research with Black and Indigenous Peoples in Latin America (2014); and numerous articles on activist scholarship, identity politics, racism, resistance to neoliberalism among indigenous and afro-descendant peoples. Director of LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections (UT Austin, 2009-16) and President of the Latin American Studies Association (2006-7).
Dr. Lisa Parks
Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies
Director, Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab
Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was formerly Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005) and Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018). She is co-editor of: Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations (U of Illinois, 2023), Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke UP, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003). Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and is Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab.
Dr. Kim Yasuda
Associate Vice Chancellor for DEI
Artist and Professor of Public Practice in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara
Kim Yasuda is an Artist and Professor of Public Practice in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. Yasuda’s creative work and public research investigate the role of art practice, and educational institutions in community development and public life. Her recent projects combine university teaching with her public research to shape pedagogical experiments that intersect disciplinary knowledge production and creative practice. In her current campus administrative role as an Associate Vice Chancellor for DEI, Yasuda has worked with campus faculty, students and staff to build coalition and cross-sector collaborations that mitigate social and environmental challenges through models of academic stewardship, public participation and mutual aid. Yasuda is lead principal investigator for two UC systemwide awards, including a 2021 UC Advancing Faculty Diversity [AFD] grant to improve campus climate and faculty retention and a 2019 UC MRPI [Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives] planning grant to create a regional platform for the UC Placemaking Initiative with Berkeley, Davis and Santa Cruz campuses.
Dr. Stephanie Masta
Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies,
Department of Curriculum & Instruction, Purdue University
Dr. Stephanie Masta is a member of the Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced Soo Saint Marie) tribe of Chippewa Indians, and is also an Associate Professor in Curriculum Studies at Purdue University. Much of her research focuses on the experiences of Brown and Black individuals in K-20 educational environments, with particular interest in Indigenous peoples and their relationships to academic spaces. Stephanie’s work is also invested in uncovering the intersections of colonialism and race within the academy. Her research is narrative-based and she uses both Indigenous methodologies and critical race/decolonial theories in her work.
Ben V. Olguin Robert and Liisa Erickson
Presidential Chair,
Department of English, UCSB
Olguín’s interdisciplinary areas of expertise include Chicanx and Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, American and Latin American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Global Studies, Marxism Studies, Speculative literary and cinema studies, Human Rights theory and praxis, Medical Humanities, and Creative Writing. His research, writing, teaching, and service activities explore the complex relationships between vernacular culture and performances of power and counter-power in local, transnational, cross-border, and hemispheric venues. He pursues this inquiry through interdisciplinary diachronic studies of institutions and contexts, where intersecting and often conflicting cultures, identities, and ideologies are negotiated through literature, performance, visual expression, popular culture, and culture in general.