Erica Kohl-Arenas

Erica is associate professor of American Studies at UC Davis and national director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a network that brings together cultural organizers, scholars, students and regional partners to imagine, study, and enact a more just “America” and world. Over the past 30 years, Erica has worked with farmworker and immigrant organizations, community development organizations, and cultural organizing and activist scholar initiatives. Erica’s book, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty, was published in 2016. At Mesa Refuge she worked on a book about radical world-building projects from the 1960s and today in rural California and beyond.