The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez grew up Union City, California. She attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she majored in sociology and took classes in Asian American Studies. Professor Rodriguez then went on to earn her PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Rodriguez’s background in Asian American studies informs her actions as an activist. Asian American studies emerged out of student movements that raised questions about access to institutions of higher learning and the politics of knowledge production. These movements, moreover, demanded education and scholarship that was relevant to communities that have been long left out of the university. Professor Rodriguez is very much inspired by that tradition. She uses the skills she has developed as a researcher to contribute to communities and is currently working closely on different projects with the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns.
Professor Rodriguez’s research is broadly concerned with understanding how processes of globalization, particularly international migration, impact the societies that migrants leave and the societies to which they move. Her book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippines Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), won an Honorable Mention for Best Book in Social Science by the Association for Asian American Studies. Professor Rodriguez's co-authored book, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Approaches will be published by Polity Press in 2014. Currently, she is finishing a book entitled In Lady Liberty's Shadow: Race and Immigration in Post-9/11 New Jersey to be published by Rutgers University Press in 2015.
