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.

Brett Snyder

Brett Snyder is a principal of Cheng+Snyder, an experimental architecture studio based in Oakland, California, and an associate professor of design at the University of California, Davis. Snyder works at and researches the intersection of architecture, media, and graphics with a particular interest in urban spaces.

N. Claire Napawan

N. Claire Napawan is an associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental design at the University of California Davis Department of Human Ecology. Her work focuses on design and planning for community resilience, with a particular interest in participatory design through digital media.

Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer (TANA) is a collaborative partnership between the Chicana/o Studies Program at the University of California, Davis and the greater Woodland community. TANA offers a fully functioning silkscreen studio, Chicano/Latino Arts exhibition space, and a teaching center for the arts. Through exhibiting, printing, and teaching, TANA cultivates the cultural and artistic life of the community, viewing the arts as essential to a community’s development and well-being.

Xabi Martinez

Xabi Soto Martinez is a trans, nonbinary, community artist of color. Most of their work has centered around youth and their life experiences, with an emphasis in community art through silkscreen printing and murals.  They were born and raised in Modesto, in the San Joaquin Central Valley, by a family of immigrants from Mexico. They have recently finished their bachelor’s degree in Chicanx Studies at UC Davis.

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.

Carlos Francisco Jackson

Carlos Francisco Jackson, a visual artist and writer, was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Currently, he is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Chicanx Studies Department at UC Davis. Since 2004, he has served as Founding Director of Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, a community-based art center operated by the Chicanx Studies Department and located in Woodland, California.

Hannah Adamy

Hannah Adamy is a PhD student in ethnomusicology and a graduate student researcher in community engagement at the University of California, Davis. She received her BA in music from the College of New Jersey and her MA in performance studies from Texas A&M University. Her master’s thesis identified processes of heteronormativity in Euro-classical vocal pedagogy. Hannah’s current research focuses on women in rock and popular music scenes in the California Central Valley. As a part of this work, she volunteers with Girls Rock Sacramento as a band coach. In her artistic practice, Hannah studies singing and speaking techniques that challenge dominant ideas of correct vocal practice.

David Campbell

David Campbell, a political scientist, is Associate Dean for Social/Human Sciences in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis. He joined the Department of Human Ecology in 1996 and since 2000 has served as a Community Studies Specialist in UC Cooperative Extension. David holds a master’s degree from The Ohio State University and a doctoral degree from the University of Oregon, both in political science. Taking community planning and service delivery systems as the unit of analysis, his research illuminates the policy dynamics and collaborative mechanisms that shape local implementation of federal, state, and foundation programs. David’s policy work has focused on welfare-to-work, youth civic engagement, and community food systems, often by means of detailed ethnographic case studies of community change initiatives.

Michael Rios

Michael Rios is Professor of Landscape Architecture + Environmental Design in the Department of Human Ecology at UC Davis. His practice-oriented research and writing focusses on community-driven placemaking and design, public space, and the social practice of urban design. Critical essays have appeared in Cities and the Politics of Difference, The Informal American City, and Insurgent Public Space. Michael has coedited several books including Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities and Community Development and Democratic Practice. He is past Chair of the Community Development Graduate Group at UC Davis and was appointed as Faculty Advisor to the Provost in 2017. Michael received his PhD in Geography from The Pennsylvania State University, and MArch and MCP degrees from UC Berkeley.