About
Kevin Lujan Lee (Chamoru) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo. As a sociologist of Indigenous politics, his work frequently deploys an innovative synthesis of Indigenous and participatory action research methodologies to improve our understanding of contemporary Indigenous social movements in the continental United States and the Pacific Islands. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Politics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he was formerly a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Political Science. Kevin’s interdisciplinary, community-engaged research has received awards and recognitions from the American Sociological Association’s Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations Section, the American Political Science Association, the Western Political Science Association, the Labor and Research Action Network, and the US Fulbright Program, among others.
Current Work
Bridging the long-standing humanistic literature in Indigenous studies with the theoretical and methodological tools of sociology and political science, Kevin's research is animated by the following overarching question: When, where, how, and why do Indigenous peoples mobilize, and what kinds of political goals they mobilize for? Currently, he is tackling this research agenda via three research strains: (1) drawing on original survey data to analyze the role of Indigenous identity in influencing Chamoru political attitudes towards decolonization in Guåhan; (2) drawing on multiyear qualitative interviews and participant-observation to analyze the institutional and organizational dimensions of Pacific Islander social movements in the continental United States; and (3) deploying historical and discursive methods to analyze the regional and global dimensions of Indigenous Oceanic political thought (with political theorist Josh Campbell).
Research Area Keyword(s)
Indigenous politics, Social movements, urban governance, Panethnicity, race