Words, like the virus, are circulating madly through invisible networks of exchange these days: words of conviction and certainty, anxiety and fear, blame and shame, praise and support, anger and outrage, compassion and kindness, hope and wonder, terror and grief. Most writers take one tack or another.  Some point to the injustices that the coronavirus… keep reading →

This blog reports on a  visit to the ICE Processing Center in Adelanto, California, organized by the Center for the Study of International Migration at UCLA. We headed out from UCLA around 9:30 am on Thursday, November 14. Five of us packed in to the car: two Sociology professors (Roger Waldinger and César Ayala), two… keep reading →

Note: This blogpost was developed in collaboration with my project team, Dr. Lu (Priscilla) Liu and Sophia Ángeles. Thanks to all the families who are participating in our project.  Thanks to the Spencer Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and UCLA’s Bedari Kindness Institute for supporting our work. The COVID-19 pandemic, with all the suffering… keep reading →

I’m re-posting my “word gap” essay that appeared on the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-faulstich-orellana/a-different-kind-of-word-_b_10030876.html here, as part of an effort to get alternative perspectives on this “gap” out into the world.  Google the term “word gap” and you get a slew of websites that treat the concept unproblematically, assuming and reinforcing deficit views. At the same time,… keep reading →

Our first day of this, our seventh year of B-Club, was….well…chaotic. There’s really no other word to describe what invariably happens every year on the first day in which the participants in our multi-age after-school club meet up for the first time, start to get to know each other, and try to figure out what… keep reading →

  Here is a link to a blog about a new project I have been conducting since May (with Dr. Priscilla Liu and advanced graduate student Sophia Ángeles) – following the experiences of 33 families across the U.S. as we move through this global pandemic.  The project is part of a 10-country study (that includes Chile,… keep reading →

Here’s an overview of Chapter 2 from my book, Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH7a98OJnOc&t=2s.  As with the other chapter summaries, it is set to music composed by Andrés Orellana (Abstract Apathy). This chapter takes us to the first day of a new field enterprise and offers mindful ways of entering a… keep reading →

Welcome to the 2016-17 academic year! I’m making a “new school year” resolution to write regularly in this blog. This is my  commitment to public scholarship and to being as transparent as I can about the work I do, why I do it, and what I learn from it.  I also want to face the hard question… keep reading →

I would be remiss if I pretended that my interest in “love” (as in my previous post) was merely philosophical and scholarly. In fact, my decision to center love in my work has been a deeply personal one, propelled by life experiences: facing my own mortality with a cancer diagnosis ten years ago, while simultaneously… keep reading →

Note: I’m blogging because it feels like something I can do in the face of the crises unfolding all around us, not because I think words are necessarily the medicine we most need right now.  But it helps me to have some sense of purpose, something that I hope could be helpful to others in… keep reading →