About

Charles Hale is the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences and a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a leading social science scholar whose research bridges multiple disciplines, with a focus on race and ethnicity, racism, social movements, and identity politics among Black and indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean. Hale is highly regarded for his innovations in collaborative approaches, which characterize his research, teaching, and administrative leadership. He previously taught at the University of Texas, Austin, and has been recognized with a Fulbright Fellowship for research and teaching in Oaxaca, Mexico. His academic background includes a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Ecology
• Law and economics
• Biology
• Environmental ethics
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology

Selected publications

• The genetic architecture of quantitative variation in the self-incompatibility response within <i>Phlox drummondii</i> (Polemoniaceae)

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-05-30 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract Flowering plants display extensive variation in selfing rate, a trait with significant ecological and evolutionary consequences. Many species use genetic mechanisms to recognize and reject self-pollen (termed self-incompatibility or SI), and the loss of SI is one of the most common evolutionary transitions among flowering plants. Despite the ubiquity of transitions to self-compatibility (SC), little is known about the genetic architecture through which SC evolves. Specifically, it is important to determine if SC has a polygenic or simple genetic basis and if variation in compatibility localizes to the genomic locus causing self-pollen recognition (the “ S -locus”). Phlox drummondii (Polemoniaceae) has been a model system for exploring mating system evolution and expresses extensive range-wide variation in the SI response. Here we investigate the genetic architecture of SC variants segregating within this otherwise SI species. Using multiple independent crosses, we uncover numerous QTLs associated with intraspecific variation in SI, consistent with a polygenic genetic architecture. While some QTLs overlap across mapping experiments, other QTLs are unique, suggesting that multiple genetic routes to SC exist. Through these crossing experiments, we demonstrate that P. drummondii has a sporophytic SI system, suggesting that an independent evolution of SI occurred in the lineage containing Phlox . We map this novel S -locus and find that the genomic region containing the S -locus is associated with intraspecific variation in SI in one of the three mapping populations. Although further work is necessary to clarify the conditions under which quantitative variation in SI represents a transitional pathway to complete SC, our study reveals the underlying genetic architecture upon which selection could act to drive this frequent and evolutionarily significant transition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Austin School Manifesto: A '20 Years Later' Reflection

  Callaloo · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Using and Refusing Indigenous Rights Law in Southern Chile

  Routledge eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  This contribution focuses on the predicaments faced by anthropologists and lawyers, working closely with Indigenous experts and activists, when they try to apply positivist legal frameworks to defend and advance Indigenous rights when the Indigenous movement in question is animated by a strong critique of the premises on which these frameworks are based. The particular ethnographic and political context is the Mapuche people's highly conflictual relations with the forest industry in southern Chile. It entails an enquiry into the Forest Stewardship Council's ‘certification’ of the forest industry, as well as a critical examination of the roles both the lawyer and the anthropologist played as advocates of the Mapuche position. While acknowledging the centrality of legal rights regimes to the Mapuche struggle, the further goal of this chapter is to subject the authors’ ‘use and refuse’ legal strategy to critical scrutiny and identify its limitations. The authors ultimately settle on an approach that both ‘uses’ and ‘refuses’ legal resources, which they call an ‘amphibious’ middle ground between two perspectives – one emerging from critical Western legal/social science traditions, the other from Mapuche ways of knowing and being that refuse these traditions – keeping them in creative tension with one another.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Professional Quality of Life and Fear of Covid-19 Moderated by Perceived Job Market Outlook: Predicting Registered Nurse Turnover Intentions in South Florida During the Covid-19 Pandemic

  The Open Nursing Journal · 2022-12-26

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Background: The nursing shortage and the aging of the nursing workforce is a growing concern for health care institutions. Understanding nurses attitudes toward turnover intentions is a crucial step to develop effective policies and maintain nurse staffing continuity. Objective: This research aims to study the impact of the Professional Quality of Life and Fear of COVID-19 moderated by perceived Job Market Outlook on South Florida registered nurses by predicting turnover intentions. Methods: From March to August, 2021, 202 registered nurses from seven South Florida counties completed the self-reporting Professional Quality of Life, Fear of COVID-19, and perceptions of Job Market Outlook surveys when predicting turnover intentions in a quantitative nonexperimental predictive correlational design research study. Results: Results showed that in the professional quality of life, burnout significantly predicted ( p &lt;.001) registered nurses (n=202) turnover intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondary traumatic stress, compassion satisfaction and fear of COVID-19 did not significantly predict registered nurses’ turnover intentions. Hierarchical regression analysis confirmed burnout is significantly more predictive than no model of turnover intentions accounting for more variance at 15.45% ( p &lt; .001). Perceived job market outlook did not moderate between the independent variables and the dependent variable turnover intentions. Conclusion: This research reveals the deleterious impact of burnout in the registered nurses’ professional quality of life and turnover intentions warranting the need for health care institutions and nursing leadership to collaborate on the needs of the nursing workforce on a micro and macro level.

  PublisherDOI

• What Difference Can Certification Regimes Make?

  University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. eBooks · 2021-07-30

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Leith Mullings, Our <i>Compañera en Lucha</i>

  NACLA Report on the Americas · 2021-07-03

  article

  The recent passing of the renowned anthropologist and anti-racist activist Leith Mullings is a tremendous loss. The three of us became close to Leith through our shared participation in the Antirac...

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 5. What Difference Can Certification Regimes Make? The Mapuche People’s Claims for Autonomy and the Forest Industry in Southern Chile

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2021-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Chapter 5. What Difference Can Certification Regimes Make? The Mapuche People’s Claims for Autonomy and the Forest Industry in Southern Chile was published in Power, Participation, and Private Regulatory Initiatives on page 96.

  PublisherDOI

• In Praise of “Reckless Minds”

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Social psychology

  The challenge, in sum, is to portray activist anthropology with a greater measure of self-reflection and acknowledged limits than the Barbados anthropologists were able to muster, while at the same time affirming their political vision, energy, and commitment. The process is demand from students, surely in response, at least in part, to the dire and increasingly polarized political conditions of the United States at early twenty-first century. The relative absence of contradiction in our portrayal of activist anthropology, ironically, becomes evidence that political fervor has gotten the best of analytical sophistication. Framed in this way, the contrast between cultural critique and activist anthropology brings the role of contradiction in the research process to the fore. The fourth quandary, regarding the role of scientific rigor in anthropological research, also receives special attention in activist research methods.

  PublisherDOI

• A Time To Recalibrate

  2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Using and Refusing the Law: Indigenous Struggles and Legal Strategies after Neoliberal Multiculturalism

  American Anthropologist · 2020 · 53 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  ABSTRACT This article begins with the contention that the three‐decade era of neoliberal multiculturalism is coming to an end. During that time, Indigenous peoples in Latin America gained a wide array of rights grounded in cultural difference by occupying spaces opened through the multicultural turn and using counterhegemonic strategies to push beyond their intended limits. Struggles in the judicial arena, and the accompanying work of the anthropological expert witness, played a crucial role in these strategies. I argue that the emerging era of racial retrenchment requires recalibration, starting with critical reflection on the counterhegemonic, and probing of alternative strategies, one of which I summarize with the phrase using and refusing the law . I draw on my participation in two moments of activist research in the legal arena—the 2003 landmark case Awas Tingni v. the State of Nicaragua , and a recent study of the relationship between Mapuche Indigenous people and the forest industry in southern Chile—as grounding. I conclude that while these two strategies and their associated sensibilities do stand in tension, they will need one another, as we seek effective means to contest the fierce onslaught of violence, marginalization, and roll‐back of rights for Indigenous peoples, and more broadly. [ judicial pluralism, autonomy, Indigenous rights ]

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Randy Strong

  South Texas Veterans Health Care System

  25 shared

• H. J. Armbrecht

  Saint Louis University

  19 shared

• M. Wessels-Reiker

  American Physiological Society

  18 shared

• M. Moore

  California State University, Long Beach

  13 shared

• Shannon Speed

  6 shared

• Arlan Richardson

  University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center

  6 shared

• Déborah Barry

  6 shared

• M. S. Buttrose

  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

  4 shared

Labs

• Latin American & Iberian Studies ProgramPI

Awards & honors

• Fulbright Fellowship for research and teaching in Oaxaca, Me…