Steven Osuna

PROFESSOR, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Dr. Steven Osuna is a father, partner, and comrade. He teaches, researches, and writes as a professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He is a scholar of political economy, racism, policing, immigration, and criminalization in the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. He received a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology with an emphasis in Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a M.A. and B.A. in Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.

Dr. Osuna was born and raised in Echo Park, Los Angeles and is a son of Mexican and Salvadoran working-class migrants. He was loved and cared for by his single mother who worked most of her life as a domestic worker. As a child, during summer and winter vacations from public school, Dr. Osuna would accompany his mother to work while she cleaned the houses of the elite and middle strata of Los Angeles. This experience and living in a heavily policed working-class neighborhood of Echo Park has shaped his world outlook and class consciousness.

Since 2007, Dr. Osuna has organized and participated in political education, student organizing, migrant and refugee accompaniment and organizing, and international solidarity in Los Angeles and abroad. With over 20 years of teaching in a public-school setting, Dr. Osuna is a professor and scholar because he believes public education is a terrain of ideological struggle that cannot be abandoned. Dr. Osuna’s scholarship appears in journals such as Teaching Sociology; Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Analysis; Race & Class; The Brown Journal of World Affairs; the Journal of World Systems Research; Chiricu; the American Quarterly, and edited volumes such as The Futures of Black Radicalism; Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter; and U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance.