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Dana Collins, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Biography
Dana Collins is a professor of sociology at California State University, Fullerton. Her research interests lie in the areas of gender, sexualities, urban communities, and critical globalizations and began with her dissertation research; she has been conducting urban ethnographic research (from 1999-2013) on a former-sex and current global tourist district, Malate, in the City of Manila, the Philippines. She looks at how urban changes (such as gentrification) are connected to globalizing structures (such as tourism). Yet she is also interested in how such globalized urban locations still maintain unique notions of “place” for the people who struggle to make community there. Her book manuscript on this research – Malate (dis)Placed: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Sexual Community – will be out in February 2016! Her other research interests lie in feminist political ecology, food justice, the making of global “crises,” urban photography, and grassroots social change; she is working on some new research on food justice and globalized “crisis” in the Philippines. Her other work appears in two of Gender & Society’s special issues—“Gender-Sexuality-State-Nation: Transnational Feminist Analysis” (2005) and “The Reaches of Heteronormativity” (2009)—as well as in Sexualities (2012), Feminist Studies (2012), Feminist Formations (2012), Tourist Studies (2007) and Signs (1999). She has co-edited a book titled New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights (2011). She believes that educational environments can incite profound changes in thought and practice as well as challenge the separation between academy and community. Thus in her teaching she strives to create a collaborative learning classroom that encourages students to connect their diverse identities, experiences, and knowledge with a realization of themselves as civically engaged agents within a rapidly changing global social world.
Degrees
2002, Ph.D, University of California, Santa Barbara
1996, M.A. (Honors), University of California, Santa Barbara
1990, B.A (Honors), Sociology and French, Bowling Green State University
Research Areas
Gender/Sexualities/Queer Studies; Critical Globalizations, Postcolonial Theory and Development; Food Justice; Transnational Feminist Activism; Urban Communities; Qualitative Research Epistemologies
Courses Regularly Taught
“Writing for Sociology Students,” “Gender, Sex & Society,” “Sociology of City Life,” “Queer Communities & Social Change,” “Methods of Qualitative Analysis,” “The Practice of Sociology”
Publications
Book Publications
Collins, Dana. (forthcoming 2016). Malate (dis)Placed: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Sexual Community. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillon.
Collins, Dana; Falcón, Sylvanna; Lodhia, Sharmila; & Talcott, Molly. (Eds.). (2011).New directions in feminism and human rights. London: Routledge.
Peer Reviewed Journal Article and Book Chapter Publications
Collins, Dana. (2015). Queering tourism: Exploring queer desire and mobilities in a globalized world. Pp. 117-26 in M. Laing, K. Pilcher & N. Smith (Eds.), Queer Sex Work. New York: Routledge.
Bhavnani, Kum-Kum, Chua, Peter, & Collins, Dana. (2014). Critical Approaches to Qualitative Research. Pp. 165-78 in P. Leavy (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Falcón, Sylvanna, Lodhia, Sharmila, Talcott, Molly, & Collins, Dana. (2014). Teaching outside liberal/imperial discourse: A critical dialogue about antiracist feminism among junior faculty. In P. Chatterjee & S. Maira (Eds.), The imperial university: Race, war and the nation-state. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Collins, Dana. (2012). Gay hospitality as desiring labor: Contextualizing transnational sexual labor. Sexualities, 15(5-6), 538-553.
Talcott, Molly & Collins, Dana. (2012). Building a Complex and Emancipatory Unity: Documenting Decolonial Feminist Interventions within the Occupy Movement.Feminist Studies, 38(2), 485-506.
Collins, Dana. (2012). Performing location and dignity in a transnational feminist and queer study of Manila’s gay life. Feminist Formations, 24(1), 49-72.
Collins, Dana & Talcott, Molly. (2011). “A new language that speaks of change just as it steps toward it”: Transnationalism, erotic justice, and queer human rights praxis.Sociology Compass, 5(7), 576-590.
Collins, Dana; Falcón, Sylvanna; Lodhia, Sharmila; & Talcott, Molly. (2010). New directions in feminism and human rights: An introduction. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12(3/4), 298-318.
Collins, Dana. (2009). “We’re there and queer:” Homonormative mobility and lived experience among gay expatriates in Manila. Gender & Society, 23(4), 465-493.
Collins, Dana. (2007). When sex work isn’t “work”: Hospitality, gay life, and the production of desiring labor. Tourist Studies, 7(2), 115-139.
Collins, Dana. (2005). Identity, mobility, and urban place-making: Exploring gay life in Manila. Gender & Society, 19(2), 180-198.
Collins, Dana. (2003). Gendered sexualities and lived experience: The case of gay sexuality in women, culture and development. In K.K. Bhavnani, J. Foran, & P. A. Kurian (Eds.), Feminist futures: Re-imagining women, culture, and development (pp. 117-23). London: Zed Press.
Collins, Dana. (1999). “No experts—guaranteed!”: Do-it-yourself sex radicalism and the production of the lesbian sex zine Brat Attack. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 25(1), 65-89.
Collins, Dana. (1999). Lesbian pornographic production: Creating social/cultural space for subverting representations of sexuality. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 43, 31-62.
Scholarly Work
Research for NSF grant ADVANCE IT on recruitment toolkits, workshops, and mentorship programs; exploring how to increase women and historically underrepresented faculty in STEM, CSUF, 2013-14.
“Sin Turista: A photography workshop in Highland Park,” “Still Life Workshop,” “Black and White Workshop”; “Street photography” & four one day street photograph workshops; preliminary research through visual method sociology into urban community and change in Highland Park, Los Angeles, 2011-present.
