About Andrew J Jolivette

Dr. Andrew Jolivétte, professor and former chair (2010-2016) of the American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University is an accomplished educator, writer, speaker, and socio-cultural critic. He is the author of five books: Cultural Representation in Native America (AltaMira Press, 2006); Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity (Lexington Books, 2007); Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (Policy Press, 2012); Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change (Policy Press July 2015); Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community (Indigenous Confluences Series, University of Washington Press, May 2016) and many journal articles and community studies including A Report on the Health and Wellness of Multiracial Youth in the San Francisco Bay Area (2008). Dr. Jolivette was recently appointed as the Interim Executive Director of the San Francisco American Indian Community Cultural Center for the Arts.

Jolivétte's writing has been featured in the American Indian Cultural and Research Journal, the Ethnic Studies Review Journal, The Yellow Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies and in several anthologies. He has served as president of the board for three organizations, Speak Out (the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture), the GLBT Historical Society &Museum, and iPride for Multiracial Families and Youth. He is the former Vice-Chair of the DataCenter: Research for Justice Board of Directors. He currently serves as a new board member with the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco and he is the Book Series Editor of Critical Indigenous and American Indian Studies at Peter Lang Publishing in New York. He is co-managing editor of the Journal of Louisiana Creole Studies which will be housed at Central Michigan University.

Dr. Jolivette recently served as scholar in residence in Native Sexualities and Public Health at the University of California, Santa Cruz in fall 2013. He was the Indigenous Peoples’ Representative at the United Nations Forum on HIV and the Law in 2011 during his two-year fellowship as an IHART (Indigenous HIV/AIDS Research Training Program) Fellow at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle. He recently served as the co-chair for the National Association for Ethnic Studies 2014 Conference, “Research As Ceremony: Decolonizing Ethnic Studies” which was held at Mills College in April 2014. He delivered a keynote address at the 2014 International Indigenous HIV/AIDS Conference in Sydney, Australia and at the Australasian HIV/AIDS Conference in Brisbane, Australia in September, 2015. He is a featured sociologist in SAGE Publishing’s new film, The World of Sociology to be released in 2016 where he gives lectures on race, gender, and sexuality. Professor Jolivette is currently the lead writer and principal investigator on a grant funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission for the establishment of the San Francisco American Indian Community Cultural Center for the Arts.

Dr. Jolivette is a Louisiana Creole of Atakapa-Ishak (Tsikip Clan), French, African, Spanish, Italian and Irish descent. Professor Jolivette is the former tribal historian for the Atakapa-Ishak Nation located between southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas.

 As a national speaker he has spoken to thousands of college students, educators, government employees and private sector organizations over the past decade across the United States and Australia (including Brown University, Syracuse University, Stanford University, the University of California at Irvine, Riverside, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Washington, NASPA, ACPA, NCORE, AACRAO, the Los Angeles County Commission on HIV/AIDS, the State-Tribal Judicial Council of California, the Oakland Indian Education Center, Seattle University, Eastern Washington University, The Environmental Protection Agency, Emmanuel College, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Sonoma State University, the University of San Diego, the Alameda County Department of Social Services, Webster University, Oregon State University, the University of Iowa-College of Pharmacy, the University of Utah, Tulsa Community College, the University of Tulsa, the City College of San Francisco, the Evergreen State College, Bellevue College, Lewis & Clark College, Spokane Falls Community College, Seattle Central Community College, Highland College, the University of Florida, University of Maryland, School of Medicine/Sheppard-Pratt,  the California Council of Cultural Centers in Higher Education, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Pasadena City College, Lafayette College, and Northeastern University in Boston among other schools, organizations and institutions). Jolivette received his Ph.D in Sociology from the University of California Santa Cruz with specializations in the sociology of race and ethnicity, the sociology of education, the sociology of Latin America, and in the sociology of education. Dr. Jolivette is working on journal article, “Don’t Scratch My Washboard: Navigating Queerness in the Creole Diaspora” Journal of Louisiana Creole Studies Vol. 1 No. 1, Summer 2016. His future research includes a multi-site, regional study of the co-occurrence of alcohol, drugs, mental health (ADM) and cancer in aging men who have sex with men (MSM) who are also living with advanced HIV disease through the National Institute of Mental Health.