YOUTH COORDINATORS
Suwayda Ali
Amina Dauood
Huumaay Banegas
Karla Garcia
Olivia Barrett
Fatima Ibrahim
Autumn R. Brown
Abdullahi (AJ) Jama
Sarah Marie Culo
Ahmad Mahmuod
PROGRAM COORDINATORS
Ethan Banegas
Ethan Banegas, a descendant of both the Luiseño and Kumeyaay bands of Native Americans, grew up on the Barona Reservation in San Diego County. He is co-owner and operator of Kumeyaay.com and serves on the board of directors at the Barona Museum and Cultural Center. Banegas teaches history at Grossmont/Cuyamaca College and Kumeyaay College and recently completed the Kumeyaay Oral History Project, which is a community-based research project, collecting thirty-one personal interviews, video-taped oral histories, and photographs from San Diego’s First People.
Yến Lê Espiritu
Originally from Việt Nam, Yến Lê Espiritu is a Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies. 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 several 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.
Andrew Jolivette
Andrew Jolivétte is a professor and chair of the Ethnic Studies department at UC San Diego. He is also the director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies minor at UC San Diego. He was the former professor and department chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University (2003-2019) is an accomplished internationally recognized researcher, educator, writer/poet, speaker, socio-cultural critic, and an aspiring chef. Jolivette currently serves as the Board President of the American Indian Community Center in San Francisco, California where he was also Interim Executive Director from 2016-October 2018. He is the author or editor of eight books in print or forthcoming. Jolivette’s book, Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community was a finalist for best book in the LGBTQ Studies category for a Lambda Literary Award in June 2017. Jolivette received his Ph.D in Sociology from the University of California Santa Cruz with specializations in the sociology of race and ethnicity, the sociology of education, the sociology of Latin America, and the sociology of family. He also holds an MA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz, an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State, and a BA in Sociology from the University of San Francisco. Born and raised in San Francisco, Jolivette is a Creole of Opelousa, Atakapa-Ishak, French, African, Irish, Italian, and Spanish descent. Professor Jolivette is the former tribal historian for the Atakapa-Ishak Nation located between southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas.
Amira Noeuv
Amira Noeuv is currently pursuing her Doctorate in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. She graduated with a M.A. degree in Ethics, Peace and Global Affairs from American University in Washington, D.C. and B.A. degree in Psychology from UC San Diego. Formerly, she worked as a Program Associate with the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, as a Research Assistant with the United States Institute of Peace, a fellow with the United Nations Association – National Capital Area, and an Event Coordinator with UCSD Qualcomm Institute. Amira’s current research is on transgenerational trauma and healing – specifically with the Cambodian American community.
Fardosa Osman
Born and raised in San Diego, CA, Fardosa Osman is a longtime resident of City Heights. A community known for their rich and vibrant immigrant and refugee communities. She is a graduate from San Francisco State University, where she studied Psychology. Fardosa has spent most of her life serving the local Somali community. She values her intersectionality as a Black Muslim Woman from a refugee and immigrant community. She works hard to create equitable, resourceful, accessible spaces in her surrounding communities to empower herself and those around her. She now works at United Women of East Africa (UWEAST) as a Youth Coordinator where she develops and implements programs that serve the needs of East African youth. In the future, Fardosa plans to develop projects that address the dilemma of refugee intergenerational trauma that impacts the new generation of East African Americans.
Shaista Patel
Shaista Patel joined Ethnic Studies Department as a scholar of Critical Muslim Studies in July 2018. She received her PhD in Social Justice Education and graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from University of Toronto in Aug 2018. Before joining UCSD, Shaista taught courses as a sessional instructor in Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at U of Toronto. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, her primary research interests include diverse fields such as Critical Muslim, Transnational, Critical Indigenous, South Asian and Black feminist studies. Her past and future publications traverse discrepant spatialities and temporalities in order to re-examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of bodies, colonialism, race, gender, religion, caste, capitalism, and relations of labor. She is primarily interested in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in critical Muslim studies, decolonial theory, questions of solidarity (from Palestine, North America to Kashmir), and cultural and social movements with special emphasis on questions of non-Black, non-Indigenous people of color complicity in settler colonialism. Her work has appeared as book chapters from Palgrave Macmillan and UBC Presses. She’s also published articles in Theory & Event, Feral Feminisms (as co-editor of an issue) and Cultural studies (forthcoming).
Frank Ross
Professor Frank received his B.A. degree in History in 1980 from Yale College. He went on to complete a second B.A. in History where he was awarded First Class Honours at Merton College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. In 1983 he entered the History Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, receiving his doctorate in 1992. Dr. Frank began teaching in 1991 as the Landmarks Assistant Professor of History at the American University in Washington, D.C., on a two-year joint appointment with the National Museum of American History. At the Smithsonian he worked as a consulting historian for the American Encounters exhibition. He began his appointment at the University of California, San Diego in 1992 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Ross Frank's areas of research extend from Spanish villages and Indian pueblos in the upper Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico, through the Great Plains, and to the Great Lakes - Eastern Woodlands regions. Much of his work focuses on comparative modes of cultural change among European and Native American groups during 1750 - 1850, a pivotal period in the history of greater North America (including Canada, the U.S., and Mexico).