GRSJ is pleased to welcome two visiting faculty to the Institute in 2025W.
Tamara Lea Spira is an interdisciplinary feminist and queer theorist whose work lies at the intersections of critical race, Latin American, and transnational American Studies. She is currently an Associate Professor of Queer Studies and American Studies in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. Dr. Spira obtained her PhD in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at UC Santa Cruz and was also UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis.
Professor Spira is the author of Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times (UC Press, 2025) and Movements of Feeling: Feminist Radical Imaginations in Neoliberal Times (University of Washington Press, under contract). Her writings on the intimate politics of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and state violence have also been published in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies, including Boundary, Feminist Formations, Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, Identities, Signs, and Abolition Feminisms.
Professor Spira’s academic work and public scholarship are informed by her long standing participation within anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and transnational feminist and queer movements. From 2013-2014, she served as a Research Scholar at the Beatrice Bain Research Center at UC Berkeley, where she coordinated the collective project, “Archiving 1960s and 1970s Third World and Anti-Colonial Feminist and Queer Transnational Solidarities.” She has also worked with a range of NGOs and movement organizations, including the United Nations, the Astraea Lesbian Fund for Justice, Justice Now, Critical Resistance, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the UC Berkeley Labor Center. From 2020-2021, she was a “Beyond Health” Fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute.
Mariangela Mihai is a Romanian multimodal researcher, transmedia storyteller, and impact filmmaker. Her ethnographic work builds on decolonial, queer, and feminist sensory ethnography methods to understand Indigenous resistance, borderland disputes, and refugee issues on the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar-China borderlands and in “the Balkans;” as well as how new media, emergent technologies, and society shape each other.
Professor Mihai is co-founder of Ethnocine, a collective of women of color and queer filmmakers pushing the boundaries of documentary storytelling through a decolonial & intersectional feminist practice. Her films have screened at international film festivals, universities, museums, and public and art institutions in Athens, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pune, Paris, New York, Yangon, New Orleans, Los Angeles, D.C., and San Jose. Her latest film, I Am A Whisper, My Dear, is a collaborative ethnofiction film that explores LGBTQIA+ activism on the Southeast Asian borderlands.
As a global expert in Responsible AI and Feminist Redteaming, Professor Mihai’s new multimodal research agenda–Halluci/nations: Surveillance, Counterrevolution, and Synthetic Realities in the Age of Ecocide, builds on her industry expertise as a GenAI Data Analyst and Prompt Engineer as well as expert witness for refugee cases in U.S. and U.K. legal systems to brings into conversation transnational feminist AI ethics and transnational Indigenous resistance movements on strategic borderlands. Professor Mihai holds a PhD in anthropology and film from Cornell University, has served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Media and Film in the Culture & Politics Program at Georgetown University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Western Washington University. She is the current Co-Editor of The American Anthropologist’s Multimodal Anthropologies Series (2025-2028).
