Angela Robinson

Angela L. Robinson is an anti-colonial Chuukese scholar who specializes in Indigenous feminisms, sciences, and ontologies, Native Pacific performance and aesthetics, interrelations of the human and more-than-human, and global social movements for environmental and climate justice.

Robinson’s research agenda takes up three primary concerns: how colonial and imperial relations of power are circulated, replicated, and naturalized through time and space; what kinds of critical tensions and possibilities arise by reading Indigenous performance and cultural production as politically mediated texts; and, how Indigenous peoples practice and theorize justice and self-determination in robust and expansive ways. Her book project, provisionally titled Colonial Climates: Indigenous Futures Beyond the Human,addresses these issues by examining how climate change functions as a colonial regime for Indigenous peoples by furthering land dispossession, resource depletion, cultural loss, and impoverishment. Highlighting the ways in which climate change operates as an incredible affective and material force of colonial power, this project tracks the human in both manifestations of anthropocentric colonial Enlightenment thought and anthropogenic environmental degradation. At the same time, Robinson examines how Indigenous ontologies of intercorporeality between humans and non-humans, as expressed in Indigenous Pacific environmental activism, performance, and other cultural production, pinpoint crucial forms of sociality that are vital to addressing climate change and its effects.

Robinson’s writings have been published in The Contemporary Pacific, Amerasia Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, The Journal of Pacific History, Teaching Oceania iBook series, and most recently an edited collection from Routledge Press titled, Knowing Life: The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies. She is also currently working as co-editor on a special journal issue exploring the politics of anticolonial ecologies.

Prior to joining the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Robinson was Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, where she co-founded the Center for Pasifika and Indigenous Knowledges and was Co-Principal Investigator on a $1M grant awarded from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and was the inaugural Mellon-Pasifika postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah.