Dr. Irene I. Vega is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her primary line of research examines how the intersection of legal and policy mandates, bureaucratic culture, and political processes shapes immigration enforcement. Her recently published book, Bordering on Indifference: How Immigration Agents Negotiate Race and Morality (Princeton University Press), draws on fieldwork with Border Patrol Agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers to show how bureaucratic indifference is produced and maintained on the frontlines of immigration control. As a Hellman Fellow, Dr. Vega is conducting a new research project mapping the experiences of upward mobility across demographic groups in Southern California, contributing to broader understanding of social stratification and opportunity structures in the region. You can find Dr. Vega’s research in well-regarded outlets, including Theoretical Criminology, Social Problems, The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and American Behavioral Scientist, among other venues. Dr. Vega teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on race/ethnicity and immigration, and graduate courses on qualitative data analysis. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Talk title: Indifference in Immigration Enforcement

In this talk, Dr. Irene I. Vega discusses how indifference–which we can understand most simply as apathy or detachment–shapes immigration enforcement agents’ ability to perform their work uncritically.

Dr. Glenda Marisol Flores is Professor and Chair of the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at UC, Irvine. Her research agenda centers on the social mobility patterns of Latinas/os into the middle class and their workplace experiences in the white-collar world, especially in teaching and medicine. Her first book Latina Teachers: Creating Careers and Guarding Culture won the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the Race, Gender, and Class Section of the American Sociological Association. Her research has been published in several venues, such as Gender & Society, Sex Roles, Gender, Work and Organization, and The Journal for STEM Education Research. Her new book-length project is based on interviews with over seventy Latina/o/e physicians in California and is titled The Weight of the White Coat: Latinos Navigating American Medicine (UC Press, 2025). Dr. Flores received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Southern California.

Talk Title: Living and Working in LA

In this talk, Dr. Glenda Flores will focus on how Latina/o educators and physicians in California navigate their workplaces.

Rocío Rosales is Associate Professor of Sociology and former Associate Dean of Faculty Development at the University of California Irvine. She researches and teaches in the areas of international migration, immigrant detention, race/ethnicity, and qualitative methods. She is the author of Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles (2020, UC Press).

Talk Title: Surviving the Sidewalk: Street Vending and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles

Street vendors are ubiquitous in Los Angeles; their rainbow-colored umbrellas dot the urban landscape. But, how much do we really know about them? In this talk, Dr. Rocío Rosales will explain how fruit vendors got their start, how a group of migrants from a small town in Mexico came to dominate the field, and the daily issues vendors face on the streets of this metropolis.

Dr. Michele A. L. Villagran is an Associate Professor at San José State University School of Information. Villagran’s research focuses on diversity and social justice in library and information science and cultural intelligence phenomena within libraries. Dr. Villagran earned her Doctor of Education in Organizational Leadership with her dissertation on cultural intelligence in 2015 at Pepperdine University. She also completed her Master of Dispute Resolution and Certificate of Dispute Resolution with Pepperdine. At the University of North Texas, Dr. Villagran completed her M.L.S. degree in Legal Informatics and her M.B.A. in Strategic Management. She is the recipient of the 2023 ALA Social Responsibilities Round Table Herb Biblo Outstanding Leadership Award for Social Justice and Equality, the 2021 REFORMA Librarian of the Year, and the 2021 ALISE Norman Horrocks Leadership Award.

Talk title: Ever wonder how culture shows up in research?

Why does culture matter in research, and what can we do to make research better serve everyone? Dr. Michele Villagran will dive into a project called Culturally Competent Research in Library and Information Science, which focuses on how researchers can do a better job working across cultures, building diverse teams, and asking questions that don’t exclude people. Listeners will get a peek behind the curtain at how cultural awareness (or lack of it) shapes everything from who gets asked to participate in studies to how results are interpreted.

Carolina Rivera Escamilla—educator, writer, theater actor, and documentarian—lives in Los Angeles. Born in El Salvador, she went into exile in Canada in the 1980s. In her as-yet untitled novel-in-progress, Rivera Escamilla is actively exploring and researching the theme of displacement, exile, retrieval, and tracing of memory within the written character’s present world. She is also translating her published book of short stories …after… into Spanish. She actively organizes events as a cultural promoter in Los Angeles. She gets regularly published in anthologies, online-lit magazines, literary magazines, and in Spanish and English newspapers. Her book of short stories, entitled …after… was published in 2015. Since publication, …after… is being utilized as part of reading curriculum in several colleges and universities. Director, writer and producer of the documentary Manlio Argueta, Poets and Volcanoes, Rivera Escamilla earned her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, University of California, Los Angeles, with an emphasis in creative writing and Spanish Literature.

Talk Title: Art, Language in Exile: The act of composing written language in the vernacular of one’s adversaries.

The interplay between art, territory, language, and memory is a multifaceted phenomenon that has been a point of interest in Carolina Rivera Escamilla’s various disciplines since she went into exile as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In the context of her own literary endeavors, she explores diverse formats within the genres of theater, fiction, documentary, and poetry, drawing parallels in dominant languages. Escamilla will discuss these themes through her short story collection …after…, poetry collection In a Corner of Your Country/En una Esquina de tu País, and documentary Manlio Argueta, Poets and Volcanoes.

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana is Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. She was the Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute from 2022-2025 and the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of International Migration from 2015 through 2021. Her research centers on the experiences of immigrant youth in urban schools and communities, including as language and cultural brokers for their families. She is the author of Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth and Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2009), Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love (Routledge, 2016), Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart, and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Routledge, 2020), and two co-edited volume: University Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal, and Language and Cultural Processes in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-Dominant Groups (Routledge, 2019). She was selected as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association in 2021and is a past president of the Council of Anthropology and Education. She was a bilingual classroom teacher in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1993. Her substack column can be found here.

Talk Title: What we could have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, and maybe still can.

This talk reports on a study in which 67 people in 35 households across the U.S. kept diaries during ten months of the pandemic (May 2020 to February 2021, 787 diary entries in total). Looking back on these diaries five years later, their words may help us all to remember not just what we lost, but what we learned. They might help us prepare for more social, cultural, political and environmental challenges, see new possibilities, and imagine possible futures.

Marisela R. Chávez, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Prior to Cal Poly Pomona, she served as the Director of the Faculty Development Center (FDC) at California State University, Dominguez Hills, where she was also Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Dr. Chávez earned her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. Her book Chicana Liberation: Women and Mexican American Politics in Los Angeles, 1945-1981 was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2024. Her research focuses on Chicana and women of color feminisms: Chicana history, politics, and identity; U.S. social movements; oral history and memory; and immigration.

Talk title: Chicana Liberation

This talk focuses on how activist Mexican American women in Los Angeles created a new activism and feminism by claiming their own voices and space while seeking to leverage power before the advent of and during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ericka Verba is Director and Professor of Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research interests include the cultural Cold War, the role of music in social movements, and the intersection of gender and class politics in Latin America. She is also an accomplished musician and was a founding member of the LA-based new song groups Sabiá and Desborde.

Talk title: Gracias a la vida / Thanks to Life

Ericka Verba will tell the story of the creation and impact of the most popular song by Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra, an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe whose music is synonymous with resistance. Gracias a la vida / Thanks to Life has been covered by artists such as Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, and Kacey Musgraves.

Dr. Ken Seligson is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at California State University Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles County. His archaeological research focuses on Ancient Maya human-environment relationships and resource management practices, as well as on ancient technology. His first book The Maya and Climate Change, which was written for a broader public audience interested in the ancient Maya, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. His current project focuses on the transition to settled life at some of the earliest ballcourt sites in Yucatan, Mexico.

Talk title: What We Can Learn from the Ancient Maya Civilization

Even though it existed over 1,000 years ago, there are still many important lessons that we can learn from the Classic Maya Civilization about adapting to environmental challenges. Cutting edge airborne laser scanning technologies are shedding new light on humungous Ancient Maya population centers and the drastic extent to which Maya society changed in the face of climate change.

Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of the award-winning Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World and has served as a historical consultant for the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as “Hamilton: The Exhibition.”

Ulia Gosart (Popova) is a social policy analyst, who examines the impact of institutional constrains on policies concerning populations with the status of indigenous peoples, and indigenous political representation.

Gosart is a descendent of Udmurts, indigenous people of the south-eastern Siberia (Russia), and was born in the former Soviet Union.

Dr. David Sandner is a member of the HWA and SFWA. His recent work includes The Afterlife of Frankenstein (2023) in Lanternfish’s Clockwork Editions and novellas His Unburned Heart (2024) from Award-winning horror press Raw Dog Screaming as well as Mingus Fingers (2019) and Hellhounds (2022) from Fairwood Press, co-written with Jacob Weisman. Sandner is the author of The Fantastic Sublime and Critical Discoursers of the Fantastic, 1712-1831 and editor of The Treasury of the Fantastic and Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. He is a Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton.

Dr. Laura C. Chávez-Moreno is an award-winning researcher, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Departments of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and Education. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education in Curriculum & Instruction.

Dr. Donna J. Nicol is presently the Chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University Dominguez Hills. She joined the faculty at CSUDH as an associate professor in 2017 and was promoted to full professor in 2021. She earned her doctorate degree in Educational Studies (with a specialization in History and Philosophy of Higher Education and a graduate minor in African American and African Studies) from The Ohio State University in 2007. Dr. Nicol was the 2021 recipient of the Faculty Excellence in Service Award at CSU Dominguez Hills.

Dr. Brittany Friedman, a sociologist, creator, and author with a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. She is a ’23-24 American Association of University Women faculty postdoc and an Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation.