About

Dr. Melissa Maceyko is a linguistic and political-legal anthropologist specializing in discourse analysis and democratic practice. Her areas of research have included social movement building; corruption; political advertising; political action; gender and sexuality; language endangerment; DEIB strategy and practice; and social justice issues related to language variation. She applies theoretical work on embodied communication, metalinguistic awareness, and language acquisition to the development of impactful conflict resolution models and diversity and inclusion trainings. She also uses her extensive training in mixed methods research on language, politics, and culture to conduct academic and applied research that is results-oriented, including designing/deploying general cultural assessments; building culturally-driven and organizationally specific DEIB strategies; engaging in more impactful legislative activism; and developing/deploying empowering public education campaigns. She is interested in how anthropological knowledge can be used to solve big problems and build human sociality. She has conducted research in Papua New Guinea and throughout the United States. For more on her DEIB work, specifically, see Willing Observers. For more on her Public Policy work, see AAUW California.

Applied Work, Activism, and Engagement

Given her belief in activism and engagement, since becoming a faculty member at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) in 2016, Dr. Maceyko has been active in many public education and activist organizations and projects. This has included organizing Teach-Ins on campus, working with colleagues through the Interdisciplinary Public Square. In collaboration with the Bulgarian School of Orange County and colleagues in Anthropology at CSULB, she has built and run study abroad programs and ethnographic field schools in Bulgaria. Dr. Maceyko also served as the chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women at CSULB and is currently serves on the California state board for the American Association of University Women as a Director of Public Policy. In 2024, she worked with the Political Science Department to create and launch the Gender in Public Policy Internship for CSULB students. She was a founding co-organizer of the Abolition Open School, an educational and activist collaboration between the American Studies Association and abolitionist groups working across the California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) systems. In early 2020, she appeared on Episode 3 of In the Thick: An Anthropological Podcast, where she discusses democratic engagement and student debt, and in late 2024, she launched her own show: The Intracultural Podcast. In 2021, Dr. Maceyko co-founded Willing Observers, a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) consulting firm with fellow anthropologist Dr. Luzilda Arciniega. The firm centers anthropological theories and methods to assess organizational cultures and create mechanisms for inclusive change. The firm provides free and paid resources, trainings, tools, and public education materials with the goal of contributing to the creation of a more equitable world.