Pronounsshe/her

Department/College/UnitSocial Sciences Division

TitlePh.D. Candidate

AffiliationGraduate

Other UCSC Campus AffiliationCritical Race and Ethnic Studies
Feminist Studies Department

Web SiteAcademia.edu

Primary Office LocationRachel Carson College Academic Building
000

Mail StopRachel Carson College Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D., Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz (in progress, 2026)

M.A., Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz (2021)

M.A., Peace and Conflict Management Studies, University of Haifa, Occupied Palestine (2016)

B.A., Sociology & Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, University of Washington, Seattle (2014)

Research Interests

My dissertation, “Palestine in Exile: Archiving Youth Art and Activism in Diaspora,” foregrounds questions of diasporic formation, movement building, and archival curation to explore the politics of world-making amidst and in spite of catastrophe. Specifically, my dissertation examines Palestine Youth Movement’s annual Ghassan Kanafani Resistance arts anthology, considering it as a movement archive and a structure of diasporic infrastructure. I primarily engage in methods of conjunctural analysis, ethnography, and literary analysis.

I am advised by Hiroshi Fukurai (SOCY & LGST), Camilla Hawthorne (SOCY & CRES), Jennifer Lynn Kelly (CRES & FMST), and Jennifer Mogannam (CRES). 

Awards, Honors and Grants

FLAS fellowship, Summer 2022

UCSC Regents’ Fellowship - 2019-2020

“Soar Award” for Outstanding Adjunct Faculty of the year, Columbia Basin College, Pasco, WA 2019

Faculty of the Year Nominee, Yakima Valley College, Grandview, WA 2016/17

Herring-Phelps Award for Scholarly Activism, University of Washington, 2014

Selected Presentations

Panel presentation, "Epistemologies of Witness in Exile: Diasporic Palestinian Poetry in the Wake of Al-Aqsa Flood" at the 2025 Media Fields IX Conference, "Witnessing" at the University of California Santa Barbara 

Panel presentation, “Shoring the Revolution: Epistemologies of Sumud and Survival through Gaza’s Beaches” with Mai Awad at the 2024 Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) + Palestine conference “Palestinian Landscapes & Liberatory Ecologies” 

Panel presentation, “Palestine beyond the Postcolonial: Articulations of Diaspora and Decoloniality” at the 2024 International Conference on Postcolonial Studies: "Trajectories and Transitions of (Post)Colonialism" organized by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Panel presentation, "The University as Front Line: Zionist Recruitment & Settler-Colonial Desires for Indigeneity" 2023 Convening of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

Panel presentation, "The Question of Palestine: Anthropocene & Settler Colonial Necropolitics in the Era of COVID-19" at the 2021 annual Law and Society Association conference 

Selected Publications

Gabriel, Robin (2022). “Coloniality & Necropolitics in the Age of Covid-19: The Question of Palestine” Asian Journal of Law and Society, Special Issue.

Hiroshi Fukurai, Robin Gabriel, and Xiaochen Liang (2022) “The COVID-19 crisis, Herd Immunity, and “Vaccine Apartheid” in the Age of Anthropocene” Asian Journal of Law and Society, Special Issue.

Co-editor of the special issue in The Asian Journal of Law and Society, “COVID-19 and Herd Immunity in Asia in the Age of Anthropocene”

Gabriel, Robin. (2021). “Book Review - Justice for Some: International Law and the Question of Palestine by Noura Erakat” Asian Journal of Law and Society, 8:1. 

Selected Recordings

Roundtable discussion, 2024 with the Popular University for Gazaa, "From (1967) Defeat to (2024) Steadfastness: Genocide & Resistance"