Amy Cabrera Rasmussen
Amy Cabrera Rasmussen
Education and research interests
Dr. Cabrera Rasmussen received her B.A. and M.A. from California State University Long Beach, and earned her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. She was a visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University and has received research fellowships from Yale University, the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the CSULB Research Infrastructure for Minority Institutions’ NIH-sponsored health disparities program.
Her scholarly work examines policymaking processes, discourse, and impact. Substantively, she grounds her work in various aspects of public policy that involve health and identity, specifically issues such as environmental health, health disparities, and reproductive and sexual health. Her research utilizes interpretive methods and a theoretical framework that emphasizes the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Current research includes a study of environmental health policy making as it affects and is affected by the local Long Beach community.
Teaching and advising
Dr. Cabrera Rasmussen teaches courses on American politics, public policy, and racial and ethnic politics at both the undergraduate and masters level at CSULB. In recent years, she has most often taught Introduction to American Government and the Senior Seminar in Law Politics and Policy. She served as one of the department’s undergraduate advisors from spring 2009 through spring 2018; in 2017 she was recognized for this work with the CSULB University Distinguished Faculty Advising Award.
Additional professional work
For the College of Liberal Arts, she has contributed to CLA’s career readiness efforts in several capacities, including regularly teaching an internship and professional development course (CLA 492). In summer 2019, she further advanced this work as part of a CLA team that attended the Stanford University Life Design Studio for Educators and co-created a new program called Design Your Long Beach. She was also part of the team, led by Dr. Beth Manke, and alongside Michelle Chang, that originated the Long Beach Community Internship Program.
Elsewhere on campus, Dr. Cabrera Rasmussen previously served as an elected member representing tenure-track faculty members in the CSULB Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and was a member of the fifth cohort of the CSULB President’s and Provost’s Leadership Fellows Program where she worked on a project to analyze and enhance the relationship between the CSULB campus and our local community.
As a member of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on New Partnerships, she worked collaboratively with her fellow task force members to create and implement the new APSA Institute for Civically Engaged Research (first held in summer 2019 at Tufts University, Dr. Cabrera Rasmussen serves as one of the Institute’s directors), the APSA Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement (the first honoree was named in 2020), APSA’s P4: Peer-to-Peer Pedagogical Partnership (piloted in spring 2019 in Houston), and the APSA teaching and learning website APSA Educate.
In the local Long Beach community, she previously served as the chair of the collaborative Just Environment Long Beach (formerly the Environmental Health Work Group of The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Long Beach initiative).
Currently, Dr. Cabrera Rasmussen serves as the Chair of the Department of Political Science.