Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas

Dr. Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas is an interdisciplinary scholar in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego in 2008. Her research is at the intersections of Critical Race Studies, Visual and Cultural studies and Geography and Law. Her work focuses on race, prisons and policing interrogates the critical questions; what lives constitute an ethical crisis? And what is the contemporary value embedded in the practice of racial violence?

She was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and has taught extensively in the UC system. She is currently completing her manuscript, Mortifications of the Flesh: Racial Violence in a Time of Crisis, which maps the historical continuities and discontinuities of policing and state violence on the material and discursive terrains of law, visual cultural productions and raced populations. She is also at work on a second book, Policing L.A.’s Human Terrain: The Criminal Non-Human at Point Zero, which examines Los Angeles County jail as a critical point on the city’s cartography of productive human terrain.

Natalia Deeb-Sossa

Natalia is an Associate Professor in UC Davis’s Chicana/o Studies Department who has conducted research in medical sociology; social psychology; symbolic interaction; race, class, and gender; and methodology. Her work makes contributions to substantive issues in inequality. Her latest book is an anthology on Chicana/o researchers’ experiences when implementing community-based participatory research (CBPR), which showcases the complexity of doing activist scholarship, the variety of ways it may be implemented, how it has been used to create sustainable change, and the challenges to create community empowerment. Her current research focuses on how Mexican immigrant farmworker mothers in a Northern California rural community, despite being marginalized and excluded at multiple levels, mobilize as cultural citizens and resist local practices and policies of educational, health, and environmental inequity.