Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program, Associate Director of American Indian Studies Research Center, and the Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up all over the east coast, with home bases in Maine and Upper-state Ny as they travelled the paths of her ironworking father. She began to do Native American studies in her first year at Dartmouth College after taking a Native American Literature class that would eventually lead her to Stanford University’s interdisciplinary program Modern Thought and Literature where she received her PhD in 2003. She went on to be a UC President’s Postdoctoral scholar UC Berkeley, which would eventually bring her back to California.

Dr. Goeman is the author of Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Settler Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrence Malick’s the New World, in progress with the Indigenous Film Series, Eds. Randolph Lewis and David Shorter at University of Nebraska Press. She is a Co-PI on a community based digital project grant, Mapping Indigenous L.A., a digital humanities and social science project launched in 2015 that maps the stories of multiple communities in Indigenous LA. She has a forthcoming co-authored chapter, “Community Resilience, “Contested” Spaces, and Indigenous Geographies” in Esri Resiliency Maps, eds. S. Steinberg & S. Steinberg outlining the process and work with LA’s Indigenous communities. Dr. Goeman’s most recent collaborative project with Dr. Wendy Teeter, Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019), looks to digital media in order to develop better practices in working with tribal communities as well as improve the flow of information back and forth, particularly on repatriation and NAGPRA issues. She has also published in peer-reviewed journals such as American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Wicazo Sa, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Funambulist: Politics of Space and Body, Transmotion, and American Indian Cultures and Research Journal, including guest edited journal volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Book chapters include essays in Theorizing Native Studies, eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, (Duke University Press, 2014), Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (Routledge 2016), Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies (2016), Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (ed. Joanne Barker, Duke University Press, 2017) and a forthcoming chapter in Biopolitics – Geopolitics – Life: Settler-colonialism and Indigenous Presences (Duke University Press).

I’m working with my advisor Kelly Kay on a research project about the phase-out of fossil fuel energy infrastructure in California and particularly by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. We are analyzing the politics and geographies of the Los Angeles Green New Deal Plan and we are also exploring what challenges municipal utilities in large urban centers face to advance towards more just energy transitions.

Kelly Kay joined the UCLA Department of Geography in 2017, where she studies the political economy of the environment and nature/society geographies, with a focus on land in North America. Her current projects look at (1) the acquisition of softwood timberland by financial investors and the impacts of ownership change on timber-dependent communities; (2) just transitions and the Los Angeles Green New Deal plan (with Andrea Furnaro), and (3) Native Hawaiian struggles to reclaim water rights with the end of plantation sugar production on Maui (with Alida Cantor and Chris Knudson).

Her work has been published in a range of Geography and Environmental Studies journals, including Nature Climate Change, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning A, Environment and Planning E, Antipode, Geoforum, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Landscapes of Finance: Time, Timber, and the Fate of US Forest-Dependent Communities, examines the changing experience of rural life in timber-dependent communities in the US as a new class of investor-owners have come to own the majority of private timberland, managing that land with different aims and temporalities than their longstanding predecessors. The project uses ethnographic (interviews, participant observation, anonymous story submissions) and archival data to document modern-day socio-ecological relationships with financialized timberland, situating these relationships within a longer history of timber company towns.

Prior to joining UCLA, she worked as an Assistant Professor in Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics, and as a Ciriacy Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC Berkeley. Kelly received her PhD in Geography from Clark University.

Cristian is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, Faculty Fellow at CDLS, and close collaborator of Aradhna Tripati’s lab. He earned his B.Sc. in Biology from Universidad del Valle in Colombia (2015) and Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona (2020). He currently leads the Data Diversity Lab at the University of Arizona. The lab has three main areas of research. First, we are interested in examining the drivers of large-scale patterns of biodiversity across spatial and temporal scales. Second, our work focuses on examining how species have responded to changes in climatic conditions during the recent past. Third, the lab develops tools and releases data under an open science perspective in accordance with state-of-art approaches in data science and similar disciplines. 

Anna Novoselov is a fourth year Environmental Science major interested in developing and inspiring novel solutions to pressing environmental problems. She hopes to conserve wild lands, encourage the sustainable usage of Earth’s natural resources and promote innovative climate change interventions. She is also interested in the intersection of well-being, lifestyle choices and environmental factors.

She is the lead of the aquaponics team of Bruin Home Solutions and a student researcher in the Hsiao Lab (which studies the microbiome). In the past, the was a leader of the Energy Team of the Sustainability Action Research Program (SAR), a writer for the science and health section of the Daily Bruin and an intern for Melio Tech, a microbial profiling startup. She is a co-author of several peer-reviewed publications and an alumni of a REU experience funded by the NSF.

She loves spending time in nature — hiking, camping, climbing mountains, and swimming — and enjoys reading and painting.