Gabby Medina Falzone

Biography

Dr. Medina Falzone is a queer, multi-ethnic boricua, and an assistant professor of African American Studies and Latinx Studies. She received her PhD in Social & Cultural Studies from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education in 2020. She is an interdisciplinary critical youth studies scholar, drawing from fields such as social epidemiology, critical psychology, and critical criminology. Her work is greatly influenced by Fanonian sociogeny and both Patterson and Cacho’s theories of social death.

Before coming to Chico State, she worked as a postdoctoral scholar for the Penn State University Restorative Justice Initiative, developing student supports for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated college students. The year before that, she lectured in the Latina/o Studies Department at San Francisco State, where she taught cross-listed classes in Criminal Justice Studies and Education.

She is passionate about supporting students from historically oppressed communities, including teaching ethnic studies students how to conduct community-engaged, culturally relevant research, and developing recruitment and retention supports for justice-impacted students.

Research

Dr. Medina Falzone’s previous research examined the criminalization, dehumanization, and disregard of Black and Latinx adolescents in schools and communities, and the social and psychological consequences of that treatment.

Her current work centers on critically examining risk/adversity frameworks in juvenile and criminal justice, which currently ignore or minimize how structural oppression, such as racism, leads to trauma and incarceration.

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
• CHLX 415: Latinx and Immigration