Over the last decade, I have been honored to be lead PI on two large Speculative Futures grants that have allowed me to help advance efforts at UCSD to establish Speculative Futures Studies as an interdivisional project shared by the Ethnic Studies and Literature Departments spanning the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities Divisions at UCSD. This research is rooted in the trans-divisional, interdisciplinary work of all the many scholars, students, and staff who have participated in our activities and events over the years.

Mellon Foundation grant ($894,000) for “Speculative Environmental Futures” (2023-present)

I created this project with co-Pis Joo Ok Kim from UCSD’s Literature Department/Arts and Humanities Division and Christopher Perreira from the Ethnic Studies Department/Social Sciences Division. Since I hold a trans-divisional joint appointment in Literature and Ethnic Studies at UCSD, we were well-poised to lead efforts to cross disciplinary and divisional boundaries and counter efforts to silo these discussions in ways that risk disappearing more heterogeneous transdisciplinary histories and draining them of their potential. We partnered with the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, the Environmental Health Coalition, and the New Children’s Museum of San Diego, among others, to co-create numerous events, happenings, reading groups, and new courses at UCSD in the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities divisions. We have been most happy to be able to award hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships to support PhD students in the Literature and Ethnic Studies Departments at various stages of their research and dissertation-writing journeys. Our work is ongoing and moving forward with a recent, May 2026 conference “Seeding Futures Now!” at UCSD and the New Children’s Museum of San Diego that brought together dozens of artists, writers, scholars, and students to think together about how the work of the great science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler helps us confront the ecological and environmental present and see and seed new and better futures. See https://www.seedingfuturesnow.com.

2019-2023 University of California Multicampus Research and Programs Initiatives (MRPI): “Speculative Futures” ($270,000)

"Queer Hemisphere: America Queer" UCHRI Research Group

Conveners:
Kirstie A. Dorr, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Deborah R. Vargas, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside
Marcia Ochoa, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Participants:
Christina Leon, School of Writing, Literature, and Film, Oregon State University
Justin Perez, Anthropology, UC Irvine
Ivan Ramos, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside
Shelley Streeby, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Jennifer Tyburczy, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Convened by Professors Kirstie A. Dorr, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego and Deborah R. Vargas, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside, and Marcia Ochoa, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, this residency aims to cultivate an interdisciplinary, multilingual dialogue between Latin America queer theory/sexuality studies and US women/queer of color feminisms. By applying geo-political pressure to ‘queer’ as an analytical category, the goal is to generate more textured accounts of and nuanced dialogues about how gender and sexual alterity are racially produced, lived and circulated in distinct, yet imbricated sites and contexts throughout the Americas. To counter the uncritical mainstreaming of US queer theory as centered site and presumed subject of study, their inquiry will address how current debates within the field concerning tensions between the rural and the urban, the public and the private, the center and the periphery, the productive and the reproductive, or the state and civil society might be differently and differentially articulated from queer and feminist of color perspectives that attend to both the geo-cultural specificities and the geo-historical entanglements that inflect relational scales of racial/sexual management.