Dr. Rusoja is a Assistant Professor in SMC's Justice, Community and Leadership program. As a scholar-activist-educator, her interdisciplinary interests lie at the intersection of critical literacy and pedagogy, human rights advocacy, and practitioner research as a methodology for decolonizing research, education and organizing.

Dr. Rusoja's main research focus is on understanding and documenting community-based pedagogies of resistance within and across minoritized and marginalized populations in the U.S. Her recent study theorizes a "communal pedagogy of resistance," or the inquiry-based intersectional and intermeshing organizing practices that are mobilized integenerationally by Latinx immigrants in the United States. 

Dr. Rusoja's research, teaching and activism are interconnected and mutually informing. She has participated in and led action research projects in the U.S. and Nicaragua, taught as a member of collaborative teaching teams in the U.S., Chile and Mexico, as well as coordinated and facilitated participatory ESOL classes for adult immigrants and refugees in the U.S. As an immigrant from Venezuela, she has been actively involved in the intersectional movements for immigrant rights and educational justice for over 15 years. She has published in scholarly and community-based journals, presented in scholarly and community-based conferences, as well as co-presented research designed and carried out alongside minoritized communities.

Dr. Rusoja is committed to research, teaching and activism that contribute to ongoing social justice movements by respecting, honoring, learning from, teaching about, and working alongside communities who are directly affected by inequity. She firmly believes these communities are best positioned to understand, produce knowledge about, and lead the challenging of the systemic oppression they experience.