About Us

Dr. Ulluminair Salim

Read Dr. Salim's full bio below and click here for a special faculty spotlight Q&A.

Ulluminair Salim, PhD, MPH explores questions of whose lives matter, whose bodies count, and who decides. Through ethnographic and theoretical inquiry, she illuminates the social production of value among vulnerable, otherwise devalued bodies in the emergence of global markets of social suffering.

At the Judy Genshaft Honors College, she leverages the study and practice of art, broadly construed, as a form of social and political activism. Through courses such as Social Autopsy, Narrative Cartography, and Beasts and Burdens: Gender(ed) Politics in the (Global) South, her students reimagine and blur the boundaries between the personal and political.

Borderlands epistemologies and representational politics have been foundational to the types of teaching commitments and research questions that motivate Dr. Salim, and she contends that education is as much about being conversant with the research literature as it is challenging it and creating new knowledges. She is especially committed to making the academy a more inclusive place for diverse ways of thinking and being in the world.

Dr. Salim's work has been supported by the University of California, the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), and the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education (ACMHE). A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she earned a BA in social welfare from UC Berkeley, a MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a PhD in sociology from UC San Francisco.

Contact Dr. Ulluminair Salim.