NCID-1897
Araceli Calderón
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Riverside City College
Education/Degree:
1 Spanish Spanish (University of California, Irvine)
About
Araceli Calderón, PhD is a first generation graduate. The misconception regarding the importance of higher education in her community, her position as a single mother confronting traditional ideologies of motherhood, and her unconventional academic path are the force behind her research, which focuses on maternal agents in the intersection of race, gender, class, and immigration during the Mexican Revolution. Dr. Calderón was the recipient of prestigious awards (i.e. UC-Mexus Dissertation Research Grant and the AAUW American Fellowship). She was selected for the Pedagogical Fellows Program and the Publicly Active Graduate Education Fellow Program. For her advocacy efforts, Dr. Calderón was honored as the 2019 Dynamic Womxn of the Year at UCI. She is an assistant professor of Spanish at Riverside City College. Dr. Calderón is committed to the advancement of diversity scholarship that promotes an understanding of historical and contemporary issues that affect women in higher education.
Current Work
Dr. Calderón’s scholarship is focused on creating a bridge between the past and the present in order to promote transformative civic engagement and empowerment for minority students. As culture changes, one of her primary goals is to engage in collaborative research and to develop strategies that organically respond to the needs of underserved student populations. Currently, the socioeconomic divide continues to widen, disproportionately affecting Blacks, Indigenous, and People of Color. Dr. Calderón’s next project is a collective memory project that will reconstruct student narratives focusing on identity, culture, and representation as related to their interconnectivity and relationality to the higher education system. The project aims to bring equity mindedness through racial consciousness and systemic awareness. Given the current climate, embracing this scholarship is of particular importance because it will shed light on student narratives that would otherwise be invisible.
Research Area Keyword(s)
collaborative research, collective memory, diversity, higher education, identity