Soma de Bourbon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San José State University (SJSU). She holds a BA from U.C. Berkeley in Native American Studies and a Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness. Her research focus is community-based participatory research with Native American and Indigenous communities. For the past two years, she has collaborated on a mixed-methods community-partnered research study in the Bay Area on assessing community perspectives on reimagining safety in the context of complex social crises.
Soma, whose ancestry is Blackfeet Indian and French, is also the faculty advisor to the Native American Student Association (NASO) and co-founder of the Native and Indigenous faculty and staff affinity group at SJSU. She is a Core Member of the Human Rights Institute at SJSU, and a Council Member of the American Indian Alliance of Santa Clara Valley (AIA).