Draft:Dylan Rodriguez

• Comment: "maintained a day job" is not appropriate for an encyclopedic entry. Article needs rewriting. Ktkvtsh (talk) 00:03, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

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Dylan Rodríguez is an activist, writer, scholar, and teacher who holds the title of Distinguished Professor at the University of California-Riverside, where he has worked since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. His theoretical and analytical work has contributed to various United States-based and global radical, leftist, and liberationist movements and organizations since the late-1990s, including prison/police/carceral abolition, U.S. political prisoner support, community autonomy and mutual aid, Palestine solidarity, and anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist projects.

Rodriguez served as Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies from 2009-2016, Chair of the UCR Academic Senate from 2016-2020, and has worked as the Co-Director of the UCR Center for Ideas and Society since 2021. As the Co-Director of the Center, he created the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream, which features scholars, artists, and intellectuals based in revolutionary, anti-colonial, and liberationist movements from all over the world. Dylan was elected President of the American Studies Association by his peers in 2020, the same year in which he was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars, a national award program that intends to "recognize the role that Freedom Scholars play in cultivating and nurturing movements for justice and freedom."

Rodríguez earned two Bachelor's degrees as an undergraduate (1991-1995) at Cornell University in Africana Studies and the College Scholar Program. He was also the first student to earn the Concentration degree in Asian American Studies. He worked closely with Profs. James Turner, Gary Okihiro, and Sunn Shelly Wong. Immediately upon completion of his studies at Cornell, he entered the Ph.D. program in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1995-2001), where he was taught by Profs. Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Michael Omi, Stephen Small, Raka Ray, Robert Allen, and others. Rodríguez's writing, thinking and teaching covers a range of topics, and is in part distinguished by its conceptualization of abolitionist, radical and revolutionary collective movement as forms of historical, collective genius that produce insurgent forms of collective being through rebellion, survival and enactments of radical futurity. He was a co-founder or founding member of several organizations, including the prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and Blackness Unbound, among others.