ABOUT DR. HAMES-GARCÍA
Michael Hames-García studies and teaches about inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability in the criminal justice system from policing and criminal courts to incarceration and reentry. His current research considers the attitudes, motivations, and experiences of people engaged with officially or unofficially overseeing local law enforcement. Their words—from interviews conducted since 2020 in Oregon, California, and Texas—are being collected for a planned book tentatively titled Why We Do the Work: Community Oversight of Law Enforcement by Extraordinary Everyday People. In addition to Why We Do the Work, members of the Community Oversight Lab (COL) are using this interview data to answer questions like “What emotions motivate people to work toward police reform?” and “How have journalists who cover the police changed their understanding of what they do in the wake of the civil unrest of summer 2020?”
His past scholarship includes two single-authored books: Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). He has also coedited Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2000), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave, 2006), and Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press, 2010), which won the Lambda Literary Foundation’s award for Best LGBT Anthology in 2011.
Professor Hames-García offers both graduate and undergraduate courses on critical theory, the criminal legal system, and Latinx studies in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has formerly taught at the University of Oregon and the State University of New York at Binghamton as well as at the Elmira Correctional Facility in Upstate New York and the Oregon State Penitentiary.
Professor Hames-García serves as the interim director for the Latino Research Institute (LRI) at and is a member of the University of Texas’s Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice. He also serves on the board of the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), occasionally advising them on strategies for settlements involving litigation against law enforcement. He was an expert witness testifying about solitary confinement conditions and best practices in a successful civil suit against Columbia County in Oregon. He has formerly served on the city of Eugene, Oregon’s civilian review board, which investigates alleged misconduct and use of force by the Eugene Police Department, and on Eugene’s police commission, which advises the police chief on policy. He has formerly served on the boards of Sponsors, Inc. (which assists men and women with reentry following incarceration), the Community Alliance of Lane County (CALC), and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS).