Faculty Advisory Committee

The UCLA American Indian Studies Center Faculty Advisory Committee comprises of members from different departments all over the campus. Click on each individual members’ research focus to read more about them.

Members of the FAC are available for contact by the media: Media Contact List.

2022–2023

Faculty Advisory Committee Chair

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  Assistant Professor Ananda Marin (Choctaw)
  Department of Education
  Email: marin@gseis.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  I explore questions about the socio-cultural dimensions of learning and development in everyday and intergenerational contexts. In one line of work I examine the practices that children and families use to reason and build knowledge about the natural world. I am particularly interested in (1) how families coordinate attention and observation while participating in science activities, (2) how mobility and place structure activity and (3) cultural variability in sensemaking practices such as question-asking and explaining. I also investigate Native American participation in STEM and cultural models of self as related to senses of capability and competence. Across my scholarship, I take a participatory approach and employ a variety of research designs and methods including: community-based design research, cognitive tasks, studies of everyday practices, content analysis, discourse analysis, interaction analysis and video-ethnography. Through my work I aim to answer basic research questions about development, innovate methods, and design teaching and learning tools that contribute to the goals and well-being of Indigenous and non-dominant communities.

Members of the Faculty Advisory Committee

• 
  Assistant Professor Tria Blu Wakpa
  Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance
  Email: triabluwakpa@arts.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  A scholar and practitioner of Indigenous contemporary dance, North American Hand Talk (Indigenous sign language), martial arts, and yoga. Her research combines community-based, Indigenous and feminist methodologies with critical race theories to examine the politics and practices of dance and embodiment historically and contemporarily in educational and carceral institutions for Indigenous peoples.
• 
  Associate Professor Jessica Cattelino
  Department of Anthropology
  Email: jesscatt@anthro.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Economy, nature, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. She studies and teaches about sociocultural life in the contemporary United States.
• 
  Associate Professor Erin Debenport
  Department of Anthropology
  Associate Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center
  Email: erindebenport@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  I am a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, interested in technologies of language circulation, secrecy and (in)visibility, indigeneity and sovereignty, and critical language documentation. My work is concentrated in the Pueblo Southwest and the Mexico-Texas-New Mexico border region.
• 
  Professor Paul Kroskrity
  Department of Anthropology
  Email: paulvk@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Language and culture, language contact, language and identity, language ideologies, anthropology and verbal art, and the ethnography of communication; American Indian Languages (especially the Kiowa-Tanoan and Uto-Aztecan families); the Pueblo Southwest, Central California.

• 
  Assistant Professor Kyle T. Mays (Saginaw Anishinaabe)
  Department of African American Studies
  Email: mayskyle@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Indigenous Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous popular culture.

• 
  Professor Teresa McCarty
  UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
  Email: teresa.mccarty@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Social Research Methodology: Educational-linguistic anthropology, Indigenous/minority education, educational language policy, youth language practices, education equity, ethnographic studies of education, and language endangerment, revitalization, and rights.
• 
  Professor Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache)
  Department of Gender Studies
  Email: mithlo@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Visual anthropology, Indigenous visual arts and curation, gender analysis, film studies, photographic archives, museum critique, arts education and Indigenous knowledge production; Native North America, globalized popular culture.

• 
  Associate Professor Stella Nair
  Department of Art History
  Email: snair@humnet.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Stella Nair’s scholarship focuses on the built environment of indigenous communities in the Americas and is shaped by her interests in construction technology, spatial theory, material culture studies, landscape transformations, cross-cultural exchange, and hemispheric networks. Trained as an architect and architectural historian (University of California, Berkeley), Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes.

• 
  Professor Angela R. Riley (Citizen Potawatomi Nation)
  School of Law
  Email: riley@law.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Her research focuses on issues related to indigenous peoples’ rights, with a particular emphasis on cultural property and Native governance.

• 
  Dr. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado
  Project Director at the Labor Center
  Email: grsalgado@irle.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  He teaches classes on Work, Labor and Social Justice in the US and immigration issues. He also directs the Institute for Transnational Social Change. He has extensive experience as an independent consultant on transnational migration, race and ethnic relations and diversity trainings for large organizations.
• 
  Assistant Professor Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear (Northern Cheyenne & Chicana)
  Department of Sociology
  Email: desisr@soc.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  My research is at the intersection of race, indigeneity, citizenship, and inequality. Broadly conceived, my research examines how sociopolitical processes, ideologies, and institutions construct, control, and erase populations, peoples, and knowledges. I am particularly interested in how such forces have manifested in settler-colonial states, their impact on persistent inequality, and how marginalized communities are mobilizing resistance movements.
• 
  Rey Soto, ex officio
  Staff Representative
  MACS Data Manager, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology
  Email: reysoto@ucla.edu
• 
  Professor Shannon Speed, ex officio (Chickasaw)
  Director of American Indian Studies Center; Department of Gender Studies and Anthropology
  Email: sspeed@aisc.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Legal anthropology; indigenous rights; human rights; indigenous migration; gender; neoliberalism, race and ethnicity; sovereignty/autonomy; activist research methodologies
• 
  Associate Professor Aradhna Tripati (Fijian)
  Institute of Environmental & Sustainability, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences
  Email: atripati@g.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  She researches and teaches about climate change; the history and dynamics of changing Earth systems including climate, ice sheets, oceans, the water cycle, carbon dioxide levels; tool development; and clumped isotope geochemistry.