Counting on Critical Resistance
Ethnic Studies
Dylan E. Rodríguez
Title: Assistant Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Riverside
Education: Ph.D., M.A., Comparative Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Double B.A., Africana Studies and College Scholar (interdisciplinary program with a concentration in Asian American studies), Cornell University
Age: 31
Dr. Dylan Rodríguez, one of the founders of Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, has become a central voice in the prison abolitionism movement. The University of California, Riverside assistant professor represents a new generation of scholar-activists who are using their interdisciplinary training to re-invigorate what many consider to be long-settled debates about race, gender and privilege within the academy and the world at large.
“Dylan represents the wave of the future in ethnic studies,” says Dr. Andrea Smith, an assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of Michigan. “He’s an important voice and an influential voice now. And I think his work is really going to be transformative for ethnic
studies, prison studies, really for anyone who’s coming at these
questions from a social justice angle.”
Rodríguez’s course is a risky one professionally. Taking political stands on divisive social issues is rarely a safe path to tenure. And he has paid a price for his activism, recently enduring a grueling, nearly
two-year investigation by the local police and the university.
“It might have started with my statements against the war in Afghanistan. I said at the time that there was no such thing as a ‘good American war,’ that all wars were acts of colonialism, empire and
domination,” he recalls.
