Full-Time Community College Educator
Erin teaches full-time at one of the largest community colleges in San Diego County– Mesa College–where she is both a Sociology professor and Assistant Chair for the Department of Behavioral Sciences. Her courses include Sociology of Family and Contemporary Social Problems teach students about the policy structures that perpetuate forms of inequities, including educational inequities. She emphasizes paid and unpaid care work, like teaching and parenting, as central to understanding social justice inequities. Erin taught popular education courses for National Nurses United before coming to San Diego, including at Sen. Bernie Sanders’ People Summit in 2017, where she taught a course to over 500 organizing leaders about political change and movement building in hostile political climates.
Researcher
What are the pros and cons of incrementalist approaches, and what are the effects of policy reform on movement targets? She explores how activists affect change in institutions that are not explicitly political, like laboratory science, healthcare, constitutional law, and mass media and the long-term effects of those changes, including how activists avoid cooptation after achieving political gains.
Erin writes about how the outcomes of activist challenges depend largely on characteristics of the institution being targeted, and how institutions like laboratory science and healthcare are structured such that even seemingly modest policy reforms can offer activists in-roads for continued and expansive access to regulatory decision-making.
For an updated list of Erin’s most recent academic publications, please visit her Academia.edu page.