What Matters to Me & Why: Natalia Molina 11/03/2021

“What Matters to Me and Why” represents a creative solution to an important and often unrecognized problem in the university setting: the separation of intellectual life from personal and spiritual issue. The people who shape USC, who teach students the ways of their particular disciplines, and who help them develop marketable skills also have a great deal to pass on in terms of worldly wisdom, moral guidance, and sources of spiritual strength.
Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor in the USC Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two award-winning books, "How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts" and "Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940," as well as co-editor of "Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice." Her work examines the interconnectedness of racial and ethnic communities through her concept of "racial scripts" which looks at how practices, customs, policies and laws that are directed at one group and are readily available and hence easily applied to other groups. In 2020, Professor Molina was honored as a MacArthur Fellow.