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Crystal Baik
Mellon Second Project Fellow

Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies
Rank: Associate Professor (first year as a tenured professor)
# of years at UCR: this is my 7th year at UCR
Top three texts I would take to a desert island: Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider; Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart; Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces.
Favorite activity: Since the pandemic, I’ve taken up birding and 풍물 (poongmul/Korean drumming).
Something people might be amazed to know about me: I’m an identical twin and my partner is also an identical twin.
An “adventure” I am looking forward to, post-pandemic: Hiking in the Inyo National Forest and birding around Mono Lake.
Website: Here is a link to an important collaborative space, GYOPO, I’ve been a part of that has compelled me to think more expansively when it comes to experimental research and experiential teaching.

Q: My research agenda summed up in one sentence:

My interdisciplinary research engages memory work that centers critical feminist orientations and racial justice, especially in relation to ongoing war, militarized migrations, displacement, and dispossession.

Q: Is there a theme or central question that organizes your work?

In my current research, I build on existing interdisciplinary scholarship to consider the creation of open-ended memory archives through methodological approaches that work against accumulation, possession, and extraction. In the broadest sense, I inquire into a myriad of consequences associated with institutional archives of memory when they are influenced by settler notions of property, whiteness, and ownership (for instance, solely defining oral histories as copyrighted products owned by institutions and organizations). Relatedly, I explore the possibility of creating memory archives that divest from a professionalized impulse to collect and accrue—especially during times of prolonged war, separation, and crisis. As a feminist memory worker, I prioritize radical care as an organizing principle by exploring what it means to approach relationship-building as an embodied form of memory archiving.

Headphones, 풍물 (poongmul) music sheet, and two books for research (E. Patrick Johnson’s Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women and Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies).

Q: How are you exploring these questions in your current project?

My current project is a creative non-fiction multimedia work that begins with 25 oral histories I’ve conducted these past two years with Korean/American feminist, femme-identified, transgender, queer, and non-binary activists, healers, and rebel rousers across social movements (and whose ages range from 21 to 80!). One of the goals of the project is to conceptualize listening, not only as a method, but as a mode of writing that attunes to “minor” moments of becoming rarely captured within traditional activist histories. I am slowly beginning to piece these narratives together and the creative writing process feels very differently from my first book project. I’m also creating an accompanying listening-archive-space for these interviews—one that is created, first and foremost, for narrators as the primary audience— alongside the book.

Q: What led you to this topic?

Before I entered graduate school in New York City and Los Angeles, I was a part of shifting networks of Korean/American feminist grassroots organizers, creative writers, cultural workers, farmers, healers, and troublemakers who, at that time, primarily worked outside of or at the very edge of formal institutions. While I moved away from these networks and spaces during graduate school for various reasons, I am circling back and returning to these people and conversations because they land for me as home in intellectual and affective ways.

Q: What do you say when people ask you what you like about your work?

For now, I’ll say that I am appreciative that my work gifts me with the space and time, as well as trusted allies, to messily struggle through and practice relational principles and ethics that are pivotal to who I am, who I am becoming, and how I want to live my life more broadly.

Q: How should – or could – the academy change for the better?

I wish the academy would prioritize critical, creative, and capacious collaborations among academics, artists, activists, and cultural workers in sustained ways that challenge how and what we define as “cutting-edge” or “rigorous” scholarship. More often than not, I feel like the academy as a whole privileges the individually-authored monograph (or article) or individual contributions to a field as the most significant criteria in determining intellectual heft, productivity, and of course, promotion. At times, I imagine what it would be like if we were actually provided with time, resources, and support to collaboratively create in ways that move away from (or at least, expand beyond) this individuation– for instance, podcasts, collaborative improvised writing, cultural work, and emergent syllabi (the latter also acknowledges how much intellectual labor, careful thought, energy, and time it takes to teach and conceptualize radical curricula).

Q: Have you gained any wisdom about teaching from your time in the classroom?

I don’t know if these are words of wisdom as much as they are part of an ongoing reflection, but I engage teaching as a mutual experience where educators and students are constantly learning from each other. Just as much as students enter the classroom to engage, learn, and/or be challenged, I also enter the classroom cognizant that my own perceptions will likely be challenged if not destabilized. This has made me incredibly humble as an educator because I have to be open to un/learning, improvisation, and changing directions depending on who is in the room and what emerges within “live” time (for instance: COVID-19!).

Q: How have you adapted your teaching “style” for the online environment?

For me, it is important that each student has the opportunity to listen to, share, and/or be heard in ways that resonate for each of them. Pedagogically, I’ve tried to scaffold different approaches that attune to the plurality of students in the space— for instance, through reserved time for journaling and/or flash drawing in class; virtual jam and collage boards; live reading and annotation; collaborative writing through shared Google documents; larger discussions and smaller group work; and tailored exercises with a peer. On Zoom, this has translated into mobilizing the small breakout room function, scheduling one-to-one meetings with students, creating structured time for students to journal and/or draw via critical prompts, using accessible platforms like Padlet to create virtual exhibits, and creating pockets of time for students to discuss questions on their own (I temporarily “leave” the Zoom space).

Q: Do you have any favorite resources that you recommend?

There are so many great resources, podcasts, and films that I incorporate into my teaching—so I’ll list two resources here! In courses like feminist oral history, I draw on Sin Invalid’s “10 Principles of Disability Justice” to provide an entry-point for students to engage disability justice (if they are unfamiliar with this concept and social movement). We then transition into discussing what it means to actually practice DJ in our oral history work (which is often anchored in audism, assumptions about what a “good voice” sounds like, the fetishization of the sonic record, etc.). Relatedly, I’ve very much appreciated Alice Wong’s brilliant work, which focuses on disability justice, race, feminism, and listening. I often assign episodes + transcripts from her podcast, Disability Visibility, in my courses.

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In Focus is a interview series that features faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Padma Rangarajan
Mellon Humanities Fellow

Department: English
Rank: Associate Professor
# of years at UCR: 3
Top three texts I would take to a desert island: The Mahabaratha, A Time of Gifts, David Copperfield.
Favorite shows to stream: Sci-fi shows from the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. I love Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, all that stuff.
Something people might be amazed to know about me: My father pierced my nose. It took him three tries.
An “adventure” I am looking forward to, post-pandemic: Hugs. All the hugs.

Q: My research agenda summed up in one sentence:  

I study the literature and history of the British Empire.

Q: Any specific time period within the history of the empire?

My work focuses on complicating easy assumptions about Empire in the 19th century specifically, and the nineteenth century in general. It is such a pivotal period for understanding our present conceptions of culture, race, culture, and the globe.

Q: What can you tell us about your current project?

My book in progress, Thug Life: The British Empire and the Birth of Terrorism, locates the origins of modern terrorism in nineteenth century imperial literature and history.

Image text reads “Thugs about to strangle a traveler! These infamous Assassins in order that the neck of their unsuspecting victim may be the more exposed for their Satanic purpose, pretending to see something extraordinary, direct his attention to the stars or skies! and when he lifts up his head strangle him!” Source: Dialogues with Thugs and Narratives of Murders (1825-40).

Q: How did you get interested in the literary origins of terrorism?

Several years ago I came across a presentation on cybersecurity by someone working in the Department of Defense. It argued for the legitimacy of the Guantanamo Bay detention center by linking it to policing in British India (and Indiana Jones!). It was such a striking connection that I had to pursue it further.

Q: What do you say when people ask you why you love your work?

I get to spend so much of my time learning about fascinating things, and I never know exactly where my research will take me. I just spent half a day recently reading Victorian tiger-hunting narratives, which are disturbing and interesting at the same time.

Q: If you could make one change to the structure of higher education today, what would it be?

I would greatly reduce adjunct teaching and greatly expand the ranks of tenured professors. The precariousness and uncertainty of adjuncting, and the second-class status afforded to adjuncts at most universities hurts teachers and students.

Q: What have you learned about teaching from your time in the classroom?

Although it’s very tempting to simply repeat a course over and over, it’s far more valuable to experiment with different techniques for teaching a text, for teaching writing, and for getting students to connect to a text.

Q: Do you have a favorite resource that you encourage students to use?

The Oxford English Dictionary, which I tout over all others because it tracks the changing history of words over time and provides citations! For historical research it’s invaluable to know exactly when and where a word was first used. For my own project, for example, it’s so important to know that the word “terrorism” didn’t exist until the 1790’s.

Q: Have you discovered any tools or tips that enhance remote learning and/or online teaching?

I’m a low-tech instructor by choice, but tools like COVE (Central Online Victorian Educator) that allow students to virtually collaborate on editing and annotating texts are tremendously helpful for giving students dynamic access to rare/expensive texts and editions.

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In Focus is a interview series that features faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Matthew King
Mellon Humanities Fellow

Department: Religious Studies
Rank: Associate Professor
# of years at UCR: 5 years
Top three texts I would take to a desert island: Sakya Paṇḍita Sakya Lekshé, Annie Dillard Teaching a Stone to Talk, Michel de Certeau Heterologies.
Favorite thing: a guitar and Anstruther Lake in my Canadian homeland of Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park.
Favorite films: Three documentaries that I have seen in recent years that I regularly bring to my students—all imperfect portraits but which tend to leave viewers aching to think, act, and imagine better—are Happiness: TV Reaches Bhutan,Unmistaken Child, and Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change.
Website: ucriverside.academia.edu/MatthewKing

Q. Your research agenda summed up in one sentence:

The social history of knowledge in late-and post-imperial Inner Asia, often paired with a history of the eastward circuit of humanist knowledge from Europe.

Q. Does your work explore a central question or theme?

Broadly speaking, the central problem I am trying to solve: How do communities come to know their past authoritatively in relation to global circuits of discourses and knowledge practices developed elsewhere.

Q. What can you tell us about your current project?

My current project: Examines a circuit of translations of a famous Chinese travel narrative entitled Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Ch. 佛國記,Foguoji) by the Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian (法顯, 337-422 CE), one of pre-modern Asia’s most ambitious wanderers. I am exploring an Eurasianist circle of translation from the 19th century that brought Faxian’s text to European, Siberian, Tibetan, and Mongolian readers for the first time. In addition to providing an annotated translation of the Tibetan and Mongolian versions of this text, my book will explore the ways that these translations (and their hundreds of footnotes) helped invent “Asia,” “Buddhism,” and the “Silk Road” as contested objects of knowledge between the academy and the monastery and across the frontiers of the West/nonWest.

Q. What else have you been up to, in addition to your current project?

Recently, I have returned from a research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Leipzig, where I developed new work as part of a wonderful working group focusing on “secularisms in pre-modern Asia.” I am spending this academic year (very gratefully) as a Mellon Foundation second project fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society on the book described above. At the moment I am also spending quite a bit of time giving talks about my recently published first book, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire(Columbia University Press, 2019).

Q. What do you love about the work you do? 

No other career pushes you to the very edge of what you are capable of conceiving and undertaking technically (ie. dealing with other languages, other modes of representing and inscribing the human imagination, other traces of tying human life to place and time, etc.).

Q. What has the experience of teaching taught you?

[T]hat the only authority I have as a teacher is when I am genuinely inhabiting the space of an inspired learner.

Photo taken by Venerable Bilguun in South Gobi Province, circa 2006.

Q. What would you change about the academy, if you could?

That we could acknowledge: 1) our very troubling role in deepening forms of social inequality (through, for example, the mass burden of student debt our institutions inflict and that pay our salaries); and 2) our professional implication in creating a massive and I would say mostly indefensible carbon emissions imprint through our rituals of plane travel and professional meetings.

Q. One amazing fact about you…..

I once found a dinosaur bone in the South Gobi Desert in the company of an incarnate Buddhist lama leading a small shih-tzu on a bedazzled leash. (We buried it after taking some pictures and you’ll never find it!)

In Focus is a new interview series that features faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Marissa Brookes
Mellon Humanities Fellow

Department: Political Science
Rank: Assistant Professor
# of years at UCR: I am in my 7th year now.
Top three texts I would take to a desert island: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation; Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions;
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
Currently listening to: Dillinger Four, Naked Raygun, Danny Brown, Malibu Ken
A favorite record I encourage students to listen to is: Propagandhi’s 1993 How to Clean Everything. It’s a political punk classic.
Website: researchgate.net/profile/Marissa_Brookes

Q: Your research agenda summed up in one sentence:

I study the politics of labor in the global economy, including how workers’ transnational activism influences employers to create and maintain “good jobs” (secure, stable, and gainful employment) in both advanced and developing countries.

Q: What contribution do you see your work making to research in this area?

Broadly speaking, the essential contribution of my research is in showing how globalization creates unique forms of power for workers, which they exercise in attempt to compel corporations to improve working conditions and protect labor rights.

Q: What questions are you currently exploring?

My current project, “Bringing Labor Back In: How Histories of Conflict Tame Corporate Power Over Time,” investigates labor transnationalism’s long-term impact on employment relations through a comparative historical analysis of global unions’ evolving relationships with transnational corporations over three decades.

Cover of Marissa’s book: “The New Politics of Transnational Labor.”

Q. You have had a busy year! What have you been up to?

Recently, I published my first book (The New Politics of Transnational Labor, 2019, Cornell University Press), presented a new paper on labor in China at UC San Diego as part of a multi-campus project on Great Power Competition in the 21st Century, and traveled to Mexico City for the Southwest Workshop on Mixed-Methods Research, an annual conference I co-founded and co-organize.

Q. When friends and family ask you what you love about your work….

Q. What have you learned from teaching students at UCR?

The most valuable lesson teaching has taught me is that students excel when they feel genuinely connected to their course material, their classmates, and their professors. They have to feel connected. They have to care. And they have to know that I care too. Only then do students develop the level of deep interest and active engagement necessary for systematic analysis and the development of critical thinking skills.

Q. If you had the power to change the academy in some way, what would you do?

If I could change one thing about the academy, it would be to eliminate the economic barriers that prevent bright, hardworking individuals from reaching their full potentials.

Q. What might people be surprised to know about the inspiration for your research?

My work is inspired by the difficult, exhausting jobs my family members have had to work over the years and the opportunities I have had for socioeconomic mobility. My mother immigrated to the US from the Philippines during the Marcos regime and never got to finish her degree. My father is a Vietnam veteran who was not encouraged to pursue a college education by his factory-worker father and extended family of coal miners. I feel fortunate and enormously privileged to be able to study the politics of work and employment as a professor at UCR.

In Focus is a new interview series that features faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Jody Benjamin
Participant, Committee on African Studies

Q. Your research agenda summed up in one sentence:

My research focuses on western African history (Senegal, Mali, Guinea) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and includes questions of African Diaspora and transnational history.

Q. Broadly speaking, what is the key aim of your research?

To center the significant contributions of continental African history both to the “early modern” period and to contemporary realities; and to push the conversation beyond standard approaches to the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism in Africa.

Q. What is your current project?

“The Texture of Change: Cloth, Commerce and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850.” In it, I explore how people across space and time deployed textiles and dress to claim individual or group status. I argue that choices made within a set of ecological, political and economic constraints structured networks connecting the Atlantic and Indian Ocean perimeters in the pre-modern era.

Q: Why study textiles, in particular?

Textiles were a major industry within the entire West African region going back centuries. They also were the biggest “global” industry of the period I study. At the heart of what became the Industrial Revolution.

Q. Any new developments in your work?

Recently, I received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete my first book. I have been invited to give a talk about my research this fall as part of the Distinguished Africanist Lecture series at the University of Chicago this fall.

Q. When friends and family ask what you love about your work, how do you answer?

I tell them that I get to spend time learning deeply about people, places and processes that have shaped our contemporary lives in ways large and small. Then I get to share what I’ve learned with other scholars, students and different audiences all over the world. How awesome! (Don’t mention all the long hours, though!)

Q. A favorite podcast:

Africa Past and Present: the podcast about African history, culture and politics (afripod.aodl.org); Afropop Worldwide with Georges Collinet (afropop.org).

Q.What have you learned from teaching?

That less can be more. Capturing a student’s genuine interest and giving them tools to take ownership of a particular topic or set of questions makes for much better learning than lots of lecture slides and tons of reading. Mix it up. Try new things. Once you earn their buy-in, amazing things are possible.

Q: If you could change one thing about the academy:

I would like to see an academy where scholars were generally more reflective about their enormous privileges (yes, you’ve earned them, but then what?), more conscious about the (non-verbal) messages they send to students and society, more generous toward their colleagues, and more deliberate about paying it all forward.

Q. Something people might be amazed to know about you:

I got my love of reading from generations in my family. I inherited a large library of books and music from my grandfather who was an autodidact because he had to be. I am the first in our family to (have the opportunity) to earn a doctorate and work as a scholar.

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In Focus is a new interview series that features faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Victoria Reyes
Participant, Mellon Advancing Intercultural Studies, Contested Histories Seminar

Department: Sociology
Rank: Assistant Professor
# of years at UCR: Entering 4th year at UCR but 3rd year on campus because during my first year I was on leave for a Postdoc at University of Michigan
Top three texts I would take to a desert island: This is a difficult one…I’d say I would take my phone and internet connection
Favorite thing: Philippine brand dried mangoes
Website: www.victoriadreyes.com

Q. Your research agenda summed up in one sentence:

I study culture, borders, and empires.

Q. Is there a specific question that arises in the intersection of these topics?

The question of territoriality – what is it? What does it look like in practice and on-the-ground? How has it changed over time?

Q. You have a new book out- congratulations!

Yes, thanks! I recently published my first book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford University Press), and received an AAUW Postdoctoral American Fellowship to work on my second project during 2019-2020. Read UCR News article about Reyes’ book >>

Q. Why ‘borders’ in particular? What sparked your interest?

My initial interest was sparked by my grandmother’s migration story through marriage to a US serviceman. Her nostalgia of the former base in the Philippines clashed with my undergrad classes on empire. I was also fascinated by what sociologists call the socio-cultural boundary-making within the Filipino American community as my grandmother was ostracized, in part because marriage migration can have a stigma of sex work attached to it.

When I went to Subic Bay, Philippines, home to a former US naval base, the differences between inside what was now a special economic zone and outside further intrigued me and the first time I saw a military ship docked, I remembered my grandmother’s awe.

So the borderlands I’m interested in are what I call global borderlands – legally ambiguous places (like overseas military bases, special economic zones, embassies, cruise ships and the like) where rules of life differ within their walls and which are symbolically seen as either arms of empire or as ways to be a part of a modern, cosmopolitan community. It’s this tension that I’m fascinated by.

Q. What are you working on now?

My current project is on reputation of places, how it is differently racialized and gendered by authors and audiences. I’m particularly interested in state attempts to shape place reputation and how that compares to narratives of places on-the-ground.

Q. What do you love about your work?

Everything! I love being able to research what I want, teach interesting subjects to bright students and engage in service work I find fulfilling.

Q. What is your top ‘take away’ from teaching?

The most valuable lesson that teaching has taught me is that the classroom is a partnership between myself, the TAs, and each student. We all learn from one another. Each and every student has something to contribute and I find UCR students to be inspiring.

Q: Given that you love your work, if you could change one thing about the academy….

It would be for the academy to be more inclusive. I dedicate my service time to DEI issues (whether on the UCR Senate’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee, writing advice columns, or establishing new awards for grad students, publicly engaged work and teaching).

Q. Do you have a favorite podcast to recommend?

I’ve been listening to the podcast “Stay Tuned with Preet” which is hosted by Preet Bharara, a former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It’s an informative take on contemporary U.S. politics under the Trump administration and he and his guests break down what various indictments, reports, and other legal matters mean in lay terms (e.g., like the Mueller Report).

Q. Any interesting facts about you that might surprise people?

I have aphantasia, which means I have zero visual processing and don’t have a “mind’s eye.” I always thought comments like “day dreaming” or how characters looked different on screen than how they imagined when reading books were metaphors! It amazes me that other people can visualize things. I’m also a true crime buff and spend whatever free time I have (which isn’t a lot with a 5 year old and a 1 year old!) reading about unsolved mysteries.

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In Focus is a new interview series that features faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Juliet McMullin
Convener, Inequities in Health, Faculty Commons Project

Juliet’s Stats:

Department: Anthropology
Rank: Professor
Years at UCR: 14
Favorite Thing: Chocolate. It is such a favorite thing that I host bi-annual chocolate parties.
Book I’m reading right now: Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot.
Personal Website: www.julietmcmullin.com

Comic of Juliet’s visit to the 2018 Asian American History graduate seminar at UCLA by Angel’s Talitha Trazo.

Q. Your research agenda summed up in one sentence:

My research agenda is designed to examine the production of inequality and its manifestations in health and wellness.

Q. Are there particular questions that stand-out for you within this framework?

While the topic of my research is health inequalities, I really see the problem that my research engages as inclusion and community building. I am curious about how we include different perspectives while building a common project. What do we do with voices/bodies that don’t conform? What is the role of storytelling in community building? Do we make spaces that respect difference, respect different experiences and stories? Or do we silence and segregate? How we define, experience, and organize ourselves produces specific forms of inequity that allow some to thrive and exacerbate suffering for many.

Q. What project are you working on now?

That’s a funny question because I typically have at least three ongoing projects that delve into different facets of the questions that interest me. I’ll just mention two projects now. One project is a community engagement effort with Riverside/San Bernardino Indian Health and tribal community members. We are collaboratively developing a historical trauma curriculum for health care providers who serve Native people. Too often, when physicians come to work for Indian Health Services they have no knowledge about the history of Native people and how that history affects their health. Indeed, many in this area don’t know that these are the current and ancestral lands of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Serrano, Luiseño, Cupeño and Kumeyaay Peoples. The content of our curriculum will honor the individual, historical and political experiences of these tribes that physicians need to know in order to provide better care. The second project that gives me a lot of joy builds on my long term work in the relations of cancer. For this project I am working with people who have been diagnosed with cancer to create comics about their medical and personal experiences. This is both a narrative/life history project and a project that explores how storytelling in the form of comics enhances personal and interpersonal understandings that might improve health and wellbeing. Finally, in my spare time, I am working on an ethnography of the graphic medicine community. Thinking around how this diverse group of artists and scholars come together around the comics medium, and how they engage the inherent inequities in our medical systems.

Q. Any recent developments on these projects, or other ideas that you’ve been working on?

The historical trauma project is supported by a community engagement award from Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Our research group, faculty and community members, are planning our trip to Aotearoa to present our work at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Conference. My colleague Kristyn Pellecchia and I recently received funding from the CSU Palliative Care Institute for a project to build a Humanities based curriculum for medical students on Death and Dying. I have a few papers from each of these projects, that have been developed and written in collaboration with graduate students, colleagues, and community partners. And in my other pocket of spare time, I’ve spent the past couple of years collaborating and developing a Minor in Medical and Health Humanities. We are awaiting final approval.

Q. What is the most valuable thing that you have learned from teaching?

Be curious. We rarely truly know what is going on in our students lives. Many students are struggling with food insecurity, housing, family and personal relationships. When they show up to class, they are bringing their best with them. What ever their best is, it is our job to use their best and to deliver on the opportunities for critical thinking and innovation that an education in a top public research university is supposed to provide.

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In Focus is a new interview series that features faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Amanda Lucia
Second Project Fellow, Center for Ideas and Society

Department: Religious Studies
Rank: Associate Professor
Years at UCR: 7
Favorite Thing: Building my secret garden.
Top texts for a desert island: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction; Max Weber, Economy and Society (Vols. I & II); Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [Chosen not on the pretense of presenting myself as smart, but rather because these are texts that I can read and reread, again and again, and still always seem to find something new and interesting bit to “think with.” ]

Yoga class, Lightning in a Bottle, 2015.

Q. Your research agenda summed up in one sentence:

What do we need to change about our own thinking to make the other people’s “strange”, “ridiculous,” “outrageous,” “insane” ideas begin to seem like common sense?

Q. How does this focus play out in your work?

Each project I work on is particular to its socio-historical context, but in general my research gets close to my subject matter, through the method of ethnography, meaning the practice of participant-observation conducted while living and working among my interlocutors. From these microcontexts, situated in the broader fields of guru studies, modern global Hinduism, and its peripheries, I have tackled theoretical issues related to gender, globalization, whiteness, and power in the guru-disciple relationship.

Q. Can you give us an example of a project that demontrates your approach?

My most recent book, with a working title of, White Utopias: Yoga, Transformational Festivals, and Countercultural Spirituality, is currently under review with the University of California Press. White Utopias is a bold book that questions why countercultural spirituality, in its various forms, has been and remains consistently and predominantly white, despite its proclamation with progressive and anti-racist ideals. The book deconstructs its foundations in religious exoticism, meaning the incorporation of ‘other’ religious forms in a search for authentic meaning, and shows how this translated into contemporary practices of white viscosity (“stickiness”) and cultural appropriation. Using both strategies of empathy and critique, I present my findings as a discordant, ambivalent, and provocatively uncomfortable window into these utopian communities, one that is both euphoric and vexed. My sustained and intensive ethnographic research shows that these fields are both radically transformative for the participants involved and problematically engaged in the logics of white possessivism.

Q. What other ideas do you have brewing?

Recently, I have been writing and writing and more writing! White Utopias took me from New Zealand, to Australia, to Black Rock City (Burning Man), to Quebec, to Joshua Tree, to Switzerland, to Squaw Valley. My eight years of ethnographic research included audio recordings from more than 97 interviews, 74 spiritual workshops, and 52 yoga classes, and infinite porto-potties! This year, it has been a reprieve to step out of the field for the final intensive writing stage. While finishing up White Utopias, I was also pleased to publish an article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religions (JAAR) that leads into my next book project on sexual scandals among celebrity gurus. My article, “Guru Sex: Charisma, Proxemic Desire, and the Haptic Logics of the Guru-Disciple Relationship,” argued that the power dynamics of the guru-disciple relationship couples with the communal belief in the importance of physical proximity to the guru, and creates social environments ripe for sexual abuse (and deterrents to reporting abuse should it occur). For this project, I am the PI for a team of researchers, who have recently been awarded a five-year, $550,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. With these resources, I am very excited to get back to India more frequently for research.

Q. What have you learned from sharing your research into the classroom?

I have been studying countercultural spirituality for nearly my entire life, but it was UCR students that forced me to focus on the overwhelming whiteness of these fields. Discussing these populations at other universities, often times the predominant whiteness of countercultural spirituality went unnoticed, assumed, and unremarkable. It assumed the distinction of white normativity, which enabled these spaces to transcend racialization. But for my UCR students, the whiteness of these fields served as a barrier, a marker of exclusion, and a cultural designation, that rendered them inaccessible, as they were majority non-white identifying students. (In addition, class was another important intersectional aspect that was students often raised.) Because of UCR students, I began to see the that the Orientalist fascination with India, the countercultural “hippies,” and even today’s proliferations of meditation, yoga, and spirituality, are raced and classed in defining ways.

Q. Do you have a favorite podcast or film you urge folks to see?

So many! But right now, I am teaching ethnographic methods and I always encourage my students to see Almost Famous. It’s a great story about the fraught relationships and intimacies on acquires as an ethnographer in the field and the sometimes distressing interpersonal situations that the writing and publishing process can generate.

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In Focus spotlights faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Matthew Mahutga
Co-Lead, 2018-19 Political Economy Seminars and the Globalization, Populism and the International Order Symposium

Department: Sociology
Rank: Associate Professor
Years at UCR: 10+
Favorite thing: My favorite past-time is just about anything on the Central California coast.
Fishing, hiking, food and wine are right at the top!
Text I would take to a desert island: How to Survive a Desert Island by Tim O’Shei (Capstone Press, 2019).

Hiking with friend Mark Martinez at Montaña de Oro State Park.

Q. Your research agenda summed up in one sentence:

My research examines the socio-economic consequences of political and economic change.

Q. Is your work purely theoretical, or does it have real-world implications?

Broadly speaking, I want to understand how political and economic processes that operate well beyond the control of the individual shape the life chances of individuals.

Q. What project are you working at present?

In my field, we are often working on multiple projects simultaneously. The two current projects closest to my heart examine income inequality. One focuses on both the predominant shape of income inequality, as well as its drivers. A key finding emerging from this project is that (a) distributional change in rich democracies is best described as income polarization and (b) this polarization is driven primarily by economic and political changes that work through labor markets in the “real” economy (i.e. through wages and salaries) , as well as extra-labor market processes (passive income of various kinds) that benefit top incomes (e.g. the 1%). The second project focuses squarely on the United States. Here we decompose household income inequality into a “within” and “between” racial group components to compare the impacts of socio-economic changes on household income across racial groups.

Q. If you had the authority to make one economic policy change in the U.S., what would it be and why?

My preferred policy changes in the US address the most important macro-economic changes since the late 1970s—globalization, technological change and financialization. These processes disproportionately benefit high-skill workers. Some of them also penalize low skill workers. Skills are correlated with pre-tax and transfer incomes. My one (well, maybe two) policy change would be (a) a significantly more progressive federal tax code and (b) larger transfer payments targeted at geographic areas most hard-hit by these processes. The more progressive tax code would extract revenue from those who disproportionately benefit from these macro-economic changes. The targeted transfers would help to redevelop areas that have been disproportionately harmed by these macro-economic changes.

Q. What about the other aspect of your work: teaching?

The most valuable lesson that teaching taught me is that most people (including students) don’t find the content of my work or pedagogy inherently interesting. This has caused me to consistently focus on how to be a better, more engaging teacher.

Q. Where can we find out more about your range of interests?

Interested readers can read most of my published research by visiting matthewcm.ucr.edu.

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In Focus spotlights faculty associates of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Anthony Jerry
Convener, Blackness Unbound, Faculty Commons Project

Anthony’s Stats

Department: Anthropology
Rank: Assistant Professor
Years at UCR: 3
Project website: culturalmediaarchive.org        

Q.  Summarize your research in one sentence: 

Q. How does your work add to current conversations in the field?

Q. What questions are you pursuing now?

Q. How do you link your projects with specific communities?

Q. It’s often said that we learn the most when we begin teaching. What has your teaching experience taught you?