Ethnic Studies

Originally from Việt Nam, Yến Lê Espiritu is a Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies, UCSD. An award-winning author, she has published extensively on Asian American panethnicity, gender and migration, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. Her most recent book, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (UC Press, 2014) charts an interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies, which reconceptualizes “the refugee” not as an object of rescue but as a site of social and political critiques. Espiritu has served past terms as Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department, and also as its Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of Graduate Studies. She has also served as the President of the Association of Asian American Studies and Vice President of the Pacific Sociological Association. She is a Founding Member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective whose aim is to integrate scholarly, policy, artistic, legal, diplomatic and international relations interests with refugees’ everyday experiences. Espiritu is the recipient of several UCSD teaching awards: the Eleanor Roosevelt College’s Outstanding Faculty Award; the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award; and the Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Awards for Excellence in Graduate Teaching; and the inaugural recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Mentorship Award.

Leslie Quintanilla’s (PhD in Ethnic Studies, Certificate in Critical Gender Studies UC San Diego) grassroots organizing and research praxis focuses on contemporary issues related to transnational borderland activisms, including women-of-color feminist artivism, environmental justice and climate change activism, and cross-diasporic solidarities. Broadly, her long-term interests include: Zapatismo, US///Mexico border(s), Italian & Mediterranean border(s), climate change, and movement organizing.    

She is a co-founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice (CIEJ), a collective of activists, academics, scientists, and artists working for decolonial environmental justice efforts trans-locally. Currently, the CIEJ is working alongside Indigenous communities to combat lithium mining driven by electrification economies. 

Prior to joining SF State, Quintanilla taught in Chicanx Studies at San Diego City College.

Dr. Jennifer Mogannam is an Assistant Professor in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and an affiliate of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and an MA in Arab and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut (AUB). 

Jennifer is a critical, cross-disciplinary scholar who examines 20th and 21st century Palestinian and Arab transnational movements and third world solidarities, with an eye for analyzing movement praxis for liberated futures. This work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, borders, colonialism and imperialism, global scales of race and indigeneity, and resistance and is grounded in transnational, women of color, indigenous, and Palestinian methods and lenses of liberation.

She also has an ongoing, collaborative Borders are Obsolete project, co-created with Dr. Leslie Quintanilla, that seeks to challenge border systems through illuminating grassroots work to circumvent them.