Lisa García Bedolla is Berkeley's Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division, and a Professor in the School of Education. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethnorace, gender, class, geography, et cetera. She believes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States. She has used a variety of social science methods – participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS) – to shed light on this question.
She has published four books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she has developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color.
Her current projects include: a multi-year study of Integrated Voter Engagement efforts conducted by six community organizations in California (with Marisa Abrajano, UC San Diego); the development of a multi-dimensional data system, called Data for Social Good, that can be used to track and improve organizing efforts on the ground; and the creation of a university-based center (the Center on Democracy and Organizing(link is external)) to support academics interested in conducting research in partnership with practitioners and that centers addressing inequality (with Hahrie Han, Johns Hopkins University; and Taeku Lee, UC Berkeley).
Professor García Bedolla earned her PhD in political science from Yale University and her BA in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.
Due to her appointment as Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division effective July 1, 2019, Professor García Bedolla is not accepting any new graduate students at this time.
