In the Media - Fall 2025

“You know, you put anybody in shackles, you’re going to make them look like a criminal, and that becomes how people contextualize their tattoos.”

—Susan Phillips, professor of environmental analysis, discusses on National Public Radio how tattoos affect the perception and treatment of migrants  

“[T]he patriotic defense of Iran isn’t a passing phase, produced under the duress of bombs, but the default position, the big idea that holds Iran together, hardened over the last two centuries of Iranian history and the trauma of the loss of territory and dignity to outside powers, including the Russians, the British, and the Americans.” 

—Shervin Malekzadeh, visiting political studies professor, writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed about nationalism and the potential ramifications of a regime change in Iran 

“We are overly dependent on warehousing. Devoting such a large share of our land use to it and not diversifying our economy is a problem.” 

—Michael McCarthy, visiting environmental analysis professor, shares his doubts about the warehouse industry in the Inland Empire with the Los Angeles Times 

“Like the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ immigrant binary, the notion of a ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ way to protest creates an ‘us/them’ binary. It functions as a form of rights-washing to guarantee a false sense of security for some.” 

—Suyapa Portillo Villeda ’96, professor of Chicano/a-Latino/a transnational studies, writes about the Los Angeles immigrant rights movement for Migrant Roots Media 

“Even now, [the ocean is] perhaps one of the few spaces on Earth that we still refer to as a kind of final frontier … that has resonances with this more colonial moment of frontier-ism, of a frontier gaze, in which we’re trying to fill out the empty space of the map.”  

—Lisa Yin Han, assistant professor of media studies, discusses her book Deepwater Alchemy on the Blue Humanities podcast of Arizona State University’s Humanities Institute (Learn more about Han's book)