Research Bio

Dr. Ikaika Ramones (Kanaka Maoli) is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. His research uses anthropological and critical theory frameworks to explore how conceptualizations of indigeneity are remade and contested from within, along what lines, and to what end. His work engages Indigenous studies (with a focus on Hawaiʻi and broader Oceania), political economy, critical theory, political theory, media studies, and social movements.

His book manuscript, Red Dirt: Dialectics of Indigeneity (under contract with Princeton University Press), examines how distinct Native Hawaiian identities are reproduced and negotiated across contemporary elite Native institutions and grassroots movements. By contributing a political economic and class analysis, it reveals how formations of Hawaiianness emerge from concrete social conditions. Red Dirt considers how Indigenous actors attempt to commensurate, appropriate, protect, or articulate conflicting economic systems, notions of value, and cultural politics.

His work also appears in American Quarterly, American Anthropologist, Visual Anthropology Review, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and Oceania. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Mellon Mays Fellowship, and the Society for Visual Anthropology / Robert Lemelson Fellowship.

Dr. Ramones is a first-generation scholar from Kalihi, O‘ahu. He holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and an MPhil and PhD in Anthropology from New York University.

Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Dr. Ramones was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Research Expertise and Interest

indigenous studies, political economy, critical theory, political theory, media studies, social movements