Director
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Dr. Rigoberto Marquez is the Associate Director of Academic Programs and Community Engaged Learning for the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He has been engaged in social justice activism, community organizing, and direct action for 15 years. Rigoberto started his community engagement by working on issues of access and equity for Latina/o(x) youth in Los Angeles schools through different education equity organizations. He then turned to working on issues affecting LGBTQ youth communities. As part of the leadership team of Queer People of Color (QPOC) of UC-San Diego, he developed different programs and initiatives to support LGBTQ youth of color in the San Diego community. He soon started doing this work across the state and eventually at the national level as Chair of the National Queer Student of Color Caucus for the United States Student Association. Motivated to continue doing organizing work at the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, he served as an Organizing and Training Fellow for the National LGBTQ Task Force where he worked to mobilize communities in California on different LGBT policy issues. After his time at the Task Force, he became the first community organizer for Bienestar, a LGBT Latina/o Health organization in Southern California. In this role, he organized one of the first Spanish language canvassing models in the country that targeted Latina/o(x) communities in order to gain support for same-sex marriage. This model was eventually adopted at the state-level and served as one of the organizing tools during California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative that banned same sex marriage.
Rigoberto completed his PhD in Education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. His dissertation, “Promotoras en Accion: the Discursive and Pedagogical Practices of Latina Immigrants Doing Queer Advocacy Work” focused on his collaborative work with Planned Parenthood Los Angele's Promotoras (Community Health Educators) on a LGBT Latino/a(x) Youth Empowerment project developed to encourage parent and community members in Latina/o(x) neighborhoods to become engaged in LGBT activism. Rigoberto has taught classes at UCLA, CSU-Dominguez Hills, University of San Francisco and Teachers College, Columbia University. Courses include Critical Race Theory and Praxis, Queer of Color Critique and Education Praxis, LGBT Issues in Education and the Law and Research Methodologies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. |
Graduate Student Coordinator
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Marguerite L. De Loney is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology dedicated to the transformative potential of participatory action research in realizing alternative futures. Based in Portobelo, Panamá, her dissertation tackles the dilemma of heritage displacement and confronts dispossession by collaborating with the local community to generate maps that account for their placemaking strategies and modes of belonging. Marguerite has also conducted research for the Stanford Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters Project and the Stanford Integrated Science and Language Project. Through her research, Marguerite aims to challenge institutional forms of knowledge production that privilege academic knowledge over local ways of knowing. Her intellectual interests broadly include relations of power, alternative knowledge production, decolonial praxis, and research justice.
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