Assistant Professor, Ariel Mosley, named 2022-23 CAMPSSAH Scholar

Mosley is an Assistant Professor of Racial Inequality in the Psychology Department at UC Davis. Her research focuses on how group members navigate their social identities and their worlds, and relate to other groups. She studies how people think about, respond to, and engage in acts of cultural appropriation, or acts of out-group cultural use. In 2020, she received her doctoral degree at the University of Kansas as a member of Monica Biernat's Stereotyping and Judgement Lab. Her dissertation examined the factors that lead to different perceptions of cultural appropriation among racially dominant and subordinated groups. She conducted her postdoctoral research career at Columbia University in the Columbia Social and Moral Cognition Lab working with Dr. Larisa Heiphetz. Her work with Dr. Heiphetz investigates how children and adults from different background perceive and experience religious curiosity. Over the next several years, her aim is to conduct basic and applied research that promotes social equality, improves intergroup relations, and cultural understanding. She plans to expand her work on cultural appropriation, social identity, and intersectionality, to further investigate how these psychological processes can facilitate ways to reduce intergroup biases and oppression.

CAMPSSAH (Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspective on Social Sciences, Arts, & Humanities) builds on the Impact Recruitment Initiative (IRI), whose origins are in calls for greater numbers of faculty whose teaching, research and service focused the experiences, contributions and aspirations of African-American and African Diaspora students and communities. CAMPSSAH represents the successful institutionalization and broadening of IRI to encompass the recruiting, integration, and retention of whose research, reaching, scholarly and creative production bring multicultural perspectives to the social sciences, humanities and the arts with an emphasis on contributions that addresses the voices and visibility of underrepresented students and communities at UC Davis. CAMPSSAH also provides a space for these faculty to strengthen and enhance their engagement with underserved communities through their research and service, within and beyond the campus of UC Davis.