Gabriela Medina Falzone (she/her)

Biography

Dr. Medina Falzone is a queer, multi-ethnic boricua, and an assistant professor of Black Studies and Latine Studies in the Multicultural and Gender Studies Department. She is also the co-founder and interim director of Project Rebound at Chico State, a student success program for Chico State students who have been incarcerated. She received her BA in Psychology from San Francisco State University and her MA and PhD in Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

Before coming to Chico State in 2021, she spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar at the Pennsylvania State University co-developing programming for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated college students. The year before that she lectured in the Latina/o Studies Department at her alma mater, San Francisco State University, where she taught cross-listed classes in Criminal Justice Studies and Education.

She is passionate about supporting students from historically oppressed communities through teaching, advising, and mentoring. She especially enjoys mentoring her course assistants in how to be effective college instructors and mentoring ethnic studies students through the research process.

Research

Dr. Medina Falzone is an interdisciplinary, qualitative critical youth studies scholar, drawing from fields such as social epidemiology, critical psychology, and critical criminology. She is interested in the social determinants of psychological health, particularly in the ways carceral practices, policies, and structures cause and exacerbate symptoms of psychological illness in Black and Latine communities.

Her previous research examined the social and psychological effects of criminalization on Black and Latine adolescents in California schools and communities. Her current work examines how adversity frameworks in juvenile and criminal justice currently ignore or minimize how structural oppression leads to trauma and incarceration, and explores more effective approaches to reducing crime, fostering psychosocial healing, and enacting structural change.

Publications 

Medina Falzone, G. (2022). Case Studies in Social Death: The Criminalization and Dehumanization of Six Black and Latino Boys. The Urban Review, 54(2), 233-254. 

Current Courses Offered

• CHLX 157: Introduction to Latinx Studies
• MCGS 495W: Senior Seminar