Bio/CV:
Irene Franco Rubio (she/her) is a scholar-activist, abolitionist, and organizer from Phoenix, Arizona. She is a first-generation doctoral student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, completing a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality and New Media. Irene’s intellectual and political commitments are rooted in her experiences as the daughter of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants and as a community organizer shaped by Arizona’s SB 1070 and HB 2281 era, a period marked by heightened racialized policing, anti-immigrant repression, and the banning of Ethnic Studies.
Irene’s research examines intersectional coalition building and cross-cultural solidarity within multiracial social movements, focusing on how and why coalitions emerge and sustain themselves amid the structural challenges of movement siloing. Grounded in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Sociology, her work traces historical and contemporary efforts to resist racialized state violence and build solidarity across ethnic communities, focusing on the U.S. Southwest. Her scholarship bridges academic research, public discourse, and grassroots organizing, contributing to broader efforts to advance abolitionist and decolonial visions of collective liberation.
Beyond the university, Irene is a public scholar, strategist, and storyteller who collaborates with national and regional justice organizations. She co-leads projects on abolitionist pedagogy, digital media, and political education, and her public writing has been featured inTeen Vogue, Forbes, Refinery29, Youth to the People, and more. As a Soros Justice Fellow of the Open Society Foundations and a Youth to the Front Fund Fellow with the We Are Family Foundation, she aims to bridge community-engaged research with grassroots organizing to challenge systems of oppression and cultivate radical futures.
Irene is a recipient of the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, the Berkeley Mentored Research Award, and the OGD Diversity and Community Fellowship. She earned her B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics with honors from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and a research assistant at the USC Equity Research Institute.
Featured Publications & Projects:
- Teen Vogue – “Mass Deportation Is Coming Under Trump — But Immigration Activists Are Mobilizing to Stop It”
- #SchoolsNotPrisonsPodcast – Creator & Host. A Soros Justice podcast exploring the U.S. carceral system through the lens of the school-to-prison pipeline, justice-impacted organizers, abolitionist praxis, and public storytelling.
- “Intersectional Coalition Building: Los Angeles Justice-Centered Grassroots Community Organizations Engage in Multi-Racial Coalition Building & Movement Solidarity” – Published in the2023 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal(Harvard University)
Research interests:
Comparative Ethnic Studies, Social Movement Histories, Multiracial Coalitions, Abolition, Settler Colonialism, Carcerality, U.S. Empire
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