Kevin Lujan Lee (Chamoru) is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science. His research focuses on (1) the Indigenous politics of decolonization in Oceania; (2) Pacific Islander social movements in the United States; and (3) Indigenous Oceanic political thought.

Trained as an urban planner, Kevin combines Indigenous methodologies with quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the distinctive dynamics of Indigenous Pacific Islander politics in Oceania (i.e. the Pacific Islands) and Turtle Island. His interdisciplinary, community-engaged research is divided into three broad lines of inquiry.

First, what are the key factors mediating Indigenous political attitudes towards the US empire in Oceania? Drawing on the 2021 Guåhan Survey (guamstudy.org), a decolonial participatory action research project in his homeland of Guåhan, the southernmost island of Låguas yan Gåni (or the Mariånas archipelago), he analyzes the role of Indigenous identity, decolonial consciousness, geography and demographics in explaining Chamoru political attitudes towards key dimensions of the imperial Guåhan-US relationship.

Second, what is the role of Indigenous culture in mediating key processes in Indigenous social movements? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork across the continental US, with a particular focus on the US state of Oregon, he analyzes how Indigenous cultural protocols and modes of social organization remake and even undermine traditional social movement dynamics of resource mobilization and political opportunity structures.

Third, what key insights can political theorists and Indigenous planners gain from contemporary Indigenous Oceanic thinkers? With Josh Campbell, a historian of political thought at UCLA, he deploys historical and discursive methods to analyze Indigenous thinkers such as Epeli Hau’ofa and Teresia Teaiwa, to engage questions of comparative methodology, of the mobility of land and nation, and of Indigenous nationalisms today.

Lee, Kevin L. “Indigenous Futurisms as Research Methodology: Chamoru Projections of Indigenous Presence into Environmental Futures.” Special issue on Indigenous Futurisms. Wíčazo Ša Review (Forthcoming 2024).

Lee, Kevin L., Daniel L. Engelberg, yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective, eds. “Planning Just Indigenous Futures.” Projections: The Journal of MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning 17 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1162/00c13b77.d28f52fc.

Lee, Kevin L., Ngoc T. Phan, Nolan Flores, Josiah Gabriel Mesngon, Aria Palaganas, Chauntae Quichocho, Nikki Aubree San Agustin. “Decolonial Subjectivities in Participatory Action Research: Resident Researcher Experiences in the 2021 Guåhan Survey.” Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice 2, no. 1-2 (2023), 264-280. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825221142286.

Thomsen, Patrick, Lana Lopesi, and Kevin L. Lee. “Contemporary Moana Mobilities: Settler-Colonial Citizenship, Upward Mobility and Transnational Pacific Identities.” The Contemporary Pacific 34 no. 2 (2022): 327-352. https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2022.0055.

Phan, Ngoc T, and Kevin L. Lee. “Toward a Decolonial Quantitative Political Science: Indigenous Self-Identification in the 2019 Native Hawaiian Survey.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 7 no. 1 (2022): 90–118. https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2021.39.