Professor Renya Ramirez has been asked to join the Critical Mission Studies Multi-campus Research Project as a Santa Cruz Co-Principle Investigator. This is a collaborative grant with the Amah Mutsun tribal nation that focuses on the California missions their ancestors suffered within. The grant, recently awarded by the UC Office of the President, supports a two‐year series of collaborative humanities research labs, individual projects, community research partnerships, symposia, and a major international conference to radically transform knowledge of California’s 21 colonial missions.
Critical Mission Studies offers new understanding of our state’s history through the lens of current, analytical, data‐driven approaches. Vastly mythologized and profoundly understudied, the state’s Spanish‐Indian missions have played a central role in defining California’s identity. Through reconsideration of the missions as both physical sites and foci of interpretation, CMS leverages research across UC, and attract scholars interested in the missions as an intellectual crossroad of colonization, religion, politics, human rights, among other topics, generating research that incorporates Native, Mexican and Mexican‐American perspectives.
Professor Ramirez' past research has focusted on Ho-chunk biography, urban Native Americans, diaspora, transnationalism, Native feminisms, gender and cultural citizenship, and relationship between Native Americans and anthropology, citizenship, and anti-racist education.
