This fall, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies welcomes assistant professor Gabriela G. Corona Valencia. Professor Corona Valencia was previously a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Associate from 2023-2025. She received her PhD in education, specializing in race, ethnic, and cultural studies from the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Her research interests include histories of eugenics, public health, medicine, reproductive justice politics, and education. Read a Q&A with her below to learn more about her work.
What are your research interests and why are you passionate about these areas of study?
My research grows from the textures of South Central Los Angeles, where my family’s encounters with schools, hospitals, and bureaucracies taught me that care and control often intertwine. As the daughter of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants who rebuilt their lives after displacement, I came to understand how institutions quietly decide whose well-being is prioritized and whose suffering is overlooked. My mother’s sterilization after my birth and my father’s ongoing struggle with end-stage kidney disease shaped my earliest awareness of how medicine and education can determine the conditions of family life. These experiences form the foundation from which my research grows, reminding me that studying institutional histories is also a way of reckoning with the legacies that structure our most intimate worlds.
My current work builds on these questions by examining the histories of medicine and public health in education alongside reproductive justice politics, community and civic engagement, and anti-eugenic movement building. I study how schools became laboratories of health reform and how educational and medical practices continue to define the body as a site of intervention. Through historical and collaborative research, I study how communities engage these legacies to build practices of remembrance, responsibility, and accountability. I am passionate about this work because it bridges historical inquiry with lived experience and honors the ways families like mine have transformed inherited harm into collective knowledge and repair.
Why did you decide to join the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois?
I was fortunate to begin my time in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies as a postdoctoral research associate from 2023 to 2025. Part of my appointment included teaching Race and the Politics of Reproduction in Spring 2024 and Spring 2025. That course gave me the chance to work closely with students who engaged the material with care and curiosity, connecting historical frameworks to their own experiences and family histories. The classroom became a place where research, storytelling, and reflection moved together, and that experience shaped how I think about teaching as a collaborative process grounded in trust and shared accountability.
Through that teaching experience, I also came to know the department as a space that sustains the same values I hope to carry forward in my work. I was embraced by a faculty community that supported my growth as a scholar, teacher, and colleague. The opportunity to join the faculty feels meaningful because it allows me to remain in a department where I have built rapport with students, mentors, and fellow researchers. I feel grateful to continue contributing to a community that approaches scholarship as intellectual labor and a commitment to justice, education, and belonging.
Can you tell us about your current research projects?
One of my current research endeavors examines the Ventura School for Girls, a California juvenile penal institution that reinforced the racial and moral hierarchies central to the state’s twentieth-century eugenic regime. Rather than focusing solely on conditions inside the school, my work investigates the network of collaboration that connected Ventura to local school districts, juvenile authorities, and public health officials. I study administrative correspondence, medical records, and policy reports to understand how education, medicine, and governance intersected to regulate girlhood and racialized family life. This research traces how eugenic ideologies shaped everyday institutional decisions, from the classification of students to the coordination of medical examinations and post-release placements. Its significance lies in revealing how eugenic violence extended through partnerships that blurred the boundaries between schooling, health, and punishment.
This attention to the circulation of knowledge and authority across institutional lines also informs my second research endeavor, which turns to popular sex education as a contemporary space where these legacies continue to take shape. I focus on how communities produce and share reproductive knowledge outside formal state frameworks, including through visual campaigns, bilingual materials, and grassroots curricula. This work asks how people create their own languages for understanding care, sexuality, and responsibility in ways that challenge state and religious authority. Through these inquiries, I document how communities have created meaning on their own terms, revealing that the struggle over teaching and learning reflects the struggle over whose lives are protected and valued.
What classes will you teach?
This Fall 2025, I will be teaching LLS 396: Community-Based Archival Methods in Latina/Latino Studies, an eight-week course introducing community-engaged approaches to archival research. The class begins with the premise that archives are living sites of power, memory, and omission. We will work with institutional, familial, and grassroots collections to consider how Latina/o histories are documented, silenced, and reinterpreted. The course encourages close attention to who constructs the historical record and what ethical obligations come with preserving community memory. It culminates in small-scale projects that connect archival inquiry to collaborative and creative forms of storytelling. I want students to experience archival practice as a form of care that exposes the power dynamics behind preservation and compels us to imagine more liberatory and autonomous ways of recording individual and collective life.
In Spring 2026 I will teach LLS 100: Introduction to Latina/Latino Studies. The course examines how histories of migration, labor, and racial formation have organized life in the U.S. and continue to shape how belonging is imagined and contested. We will study how Latina/o communities have transformed displacement and exclusion into acts of creation, care, and political vision. The readings and media selections move between testimonios, visual culture, and local histories to connect intimate experiences of family and identity with broader questions of nation and power. My goal is for the class to cultivate a way of thinking that links self-knowledge to structural analysis, encouraging students to see Latina/Latino Studies as a discipline that makes visible the relationships between survival, imagination, and social transformation.
What key ideas or lessons do you hope to impart to your students?
What I hope to impart through my teaching and mentorship is an understanding that learning is a relationship built on curiosity, accountability, and care. My pedagogy draws from Paulo Freire’s view of education as a practice that awakens consciousness through dialogue and reflection. His work shapes how I think about teaching as a shared process where questions open possibilities for transformation. I treat the classroom as a collective space where listening, analysis, and imagination work together to build understanding.
The lesson that stays with me is that knowledge should be alive in the world. In my courses, we return to history to trace how its legacies continue to influence institutions, families, and experiences of belonging. I want students to recognize how power moves through language, policy, and daily life, and to approach learning as a form of engagement that sustains care and critical attention. Teaching, for me, is a continuous conversation about how we study, remember, and repair. It asks us to consider what kind of future our learning makes possible.