Vol. 1, Issue 3 | Spring 2026

A new report by Political Science Professor Paasha Mahdavi, the UCSB 2035 Initiative, and the UCSB Community Labor Center, finds that a solid majority of local residents support the phasing out of Santa Barbara County's oil and gas operations. According to a survey of 2700 residents, roughly 60-65% of county residents support such a phaseout, with support rising substantially when policies are paired with worker protections and oil well cleanup.

The Pahl Center for the Study of Critical Social Issues has announced the appointment of Dr. Daniel Masterson as the 7th Pahl Scholar. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Masterson will investigate the economic and social consequences for the tens of thousands of Hondurans deported annually—a population that often returns to a cycle of poverty and coerced mobility with little to no institutional support.

UC Santa Barbara’s Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy has been awarded a prestigious $100,000 grant from the California Environmental Justice Alliance which will enable it to continue its research and advocacy on behalf of the Central Coast’s most vulnerable populations. It will specifically bolster the Center’s Central Coast Regional Equity Initiative (CCREI), a project dedicated to documenting and dismantling the disparities in housing, health, and environmental risk that disproportionately affect multi-racial working-class communities in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties.

At UCSB's Public Finance Lab, fellow economists Youssef Benzarti and Alisa Tazhitdinova are working to make crucial economic data more publicly available. The lab is currently developing a comprehensive portal for Santa Barbara County with centralized local data points that directly impact quality of life, such as crime rates, inflation, and even groundwater levels. They're also creating tools to help UCSB students with their taxes.

"As a feminist and disability studies scholar, I am especially passionate about supporting immigrant, first-generation, and non-traditional students in their college careers, with a focus on countering academic ableism and ensuring my scholarship and pedagogy are accessible for students of all backgrounds and abilities. As an educator, I hope to cultivate in my students a spirited sense of wonder, curiosity, and enthrallment in their quest for knowledge — that creativity, experimentation, and making mistakes are perhaps more valuable (and fun) than simply trying to find the ‘right’ answers to things."

Matthieu Duncan ’87 knows the power of learning by doing, a philosophy that brought him from Wall Street to decades of living abroad. Now he and his wife Marie-Ann are championing programs that give students the kind of real-world investment and overseas study opportunities that helped him succeed after leaving UCSB. Both the Social Sciences Division Dean's Investment Group and Duncan Family Education Abroad Scholarship are funded with their generous contributions.

In an April 22 Los Angeles Times opinion piece, Matthew Kinsella-Walsh, a graduate researcher with the UCSB Community Labor Center and the Organizing Knowledges Project, highlighted the economic impacts of recent immigration enforcement raids on California's Central Coast agricultural economy. He detailed recent changes to the federal government's policy governing temporary work, arguing in favor of legislation to guarantee basic protections to farmworkers.