Sara Salazar Hughes

Sara Salazar Hughes, PhD (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Social Sciences and Global Studies at California State University - Monterey Bay. Sara received her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, and also holds an MA in International Studies from the University of San Francisco and a BA in Arabic from the University of California, Los Angeles. A political and cultural geographer by training, she studies territorial conflict and land - both societies' connections to land and various means of control over it - primarily in Israel/Palestine. Sara's research examines the construction of home(land) in contested territory, everyday life in conflict zones, material and discursive mechanisms of territorial control, and how the construction of belonging for one group depends on the displacement and dispossession of another. Her use of ethnographic and qualitative methods is aimed at representing the world in a way that captures subjects' understandings, feelings, and choices, while applying a critical eye to the reality they perceive and seek to (re)produce. 

Sara's areas of specialization in teaching and research include: political geography, cultural geography, political ecology and environmental justice, settler colonial studies, international development (particularly "sustainable" development), border and mobility studies, and Palestine/Israel studies. In her research, teaching, and organizing Sara centers love, care, reciprocity, and social and environmental justice. She serves as the faculty mentor for the Global Otters Club at CSUMB and is the executive producer (with Dr. Sriya Shrestha) of the OtterPod, a social science and public humanities podcast by CSUMB undergraduates that focuses on issues of social, racial, and environmental justice.