About

Nicole A. Iturriaga, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine, affiliated with the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and the Department of Sociology by courtesy. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018, where her dissertation focused on forensic science, DNA, and the rewriting of Spain's violent history. Her academic work centers on the intersections of human rights, technology, and memory, particularly in the context of violent pasts and transitional justice. Prior to her current appointment, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany from 2018 to 2021. Iturriaga's research critically examines how forensic science and human rights activism contribute to reshaping collective memories and historical narratives, especially in post-conflict societies such as Spain. Her book, "Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory and Rewriting Spain’s Past," published by Columbia University Press in 2022, has received significant recognition, including the 2023 ASA Collective Behavior and Social Movements Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award. Through her interdisciplinary approach, Iturriaga explores the moral imperatives of reburial and the role of objective science in addressing state terror and human rights violations, contributing to scholarly conversations on memory, violence, and social justice.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Gender studies
• History
• Psychology
• Criminology
• Genetics
• Epistemology
• Anthropology
• Biology

Selected publications

• Beyond Biological Essentialism: White Nationalism, Health Disparities Data, and the Cultivation of Lay Agnotology

  CrimRxiv · 2025-05-29

  preprintOpen access

  Scholars and practitioners position health disparities research as an important tool for redressing race-based inequities and re-conceptualizing racialized health outcomes in non-essentialist terms. Given this context, we explore a peculiar phenomenon, which is the circulation of such research among white nationalists. We discover that white nationalists incorporate and respond to health disparities research not solely to defend racist and essentialist reasoning, but also to project a discourse that indicts the science establishment for ostensibly incorporating liberal politics, corrupting inquiry, and obfuscating understanding of biology in the name of anti-racism or social constructionism. We term this practice “lay agnotology,” as it involves white nationalists capitalizing on their role as non-specialists to charge the health disparities field and its expert contributors with an alleged set of institutionalized biases that produce ignorance about the ‘truth’ of race. We connect this finding to the literature on racialized ignorance, as it demonstrates how stories about the institutional nature of science can be as central to myth-making about race as stories about the scientific nature of people.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Genetics and Scientific Values: Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta, Nicole Iturriaga, and Bernard Koch Reply

  The Hastings Center Report · 2025-05-01 · 1 citations

  letter

  This letter responds to the letter by Jan te Nijenhuis, Bryan J. Pesta, and John G. R. Fuerst in the May-June 2025 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

  PublisherDOI

• Feminist retroviruses to white Sharia: Gender “science fan fiction” on 4Chan

  Public Understanding of Science · 2024-02-27 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article demonstrates-based on an interpretive discourse analysis of three types of memes (Rabid Feminists, Women's Bodies, Policy Ideas) and secondary thread discourse on 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" discussion board-two key findings: (1) the existence of a gendered hate based scientific discourse, "science fan fiction," in online spaces and (2) how gender "science fan fiction" is an outcome of the male supremacist cosmology, by producing and justifying resentment against white women as being both inherently untrustworthy (politically, sexually, intellectually) and dangerous. This perspective-which combines hatred and distrust of women with white nationalist anxieties about demographic shifts, racial integrity, and sexuality-then motivates misogynist policy ideas including total domination of women or their removal. 4chan users employ this discourse to "scientifically" substantiate claims of white male supremacy, the fundamental untrustworthiness of white women, and to argue white women's inherent threat to white male supremacist goals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Confronting the “Weaponization” of Genetics by Racists Online and Elsewhere

  The Hastings Center Report · 2024-12-01 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Genomics research is regularly appropriated in social and political contexts to publicly legitimize unjust and malicious political views, policies, and actions. In recent years, there have been high-profile cases of mass shooters, public intellectuals, and political insiders using genomics findings to convince audiences that deadly force and coercive policies against racial minorities are warranted. To create a just genomics, geneticists must consider what makes their research so attractive and adaptable for the legitimization of unjust ends and what they can do to counter such appropriations. We offer insights and recommendations drawing from our research into the many ways online white nationalist and far-right political movements mobilize genetics research to promote their racist, sexist, antisemitic, and homophobic views. First, geneticists should identify and change routine research practices that feed eugenic thinking. Second, geneticists should adopt creative extra-scholarly communication efforts to counter the use of their field's research that occurs in nonscholarly spaces. Third, we identify permissive epistemological and professional practices within the genetics field that have enabled such unjust appropriations to thrive, and we recommend strategies for institutional reform.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Racist Agnotology: How Myth-Making about Institutions and Knowledge Production Contributes to Racialized Ignorance

  Sociology of Race and Ethnicity · 2024-06-17 · 3 citations

  article

  Recently, scholars have revitalized the study of race by exploring how ignorance epistemologically fortifies racial domination. To articulate terms of analysis, much of this literature invokes two recurrent modes of racialized ignorance—racist essentialism and racialized nonknowing. We introduce a third mode—racist agnotology. With racist agnotology, actors perpetuate racialized ignorance by characterizing social constructionist accounts of race or anti-racist forms of knowledge as evidence of how knowledge-producing institutions—like science, academia, or other research-intensive fields—have become intellectually compromised or beholden to political principles that produce inaccurate knowledge about race. Whereas racist essentialism and racialized nonknowing produce ignorance by, respectively, distorting and occluding knowledge about racialized subjects, racist agnotology produces ignorance through stories and narratives about how such knowledge is prefigured by institutions. To demonstrate the usefulness of our contribution, and its relationship to extant literature, we empirically explore the intersection of race and health to illustrate how racialized ignorance thrives in patterned ways that reflect the logics of racist essentialism, racialized nonknowing, and racist agnotology. Our analysis reveals additional stakes and contours involved in the phenomenon of racialized ignorance. Importantly, it also reveals how many of the hermeneutic processes that have been revelatory for scholars and their study of race and ignorance—for example, demystification—can be used toward racist ends as well. In this regard, our contribution helps apprehend and theorize the social politics of knowledge involved in much of the contemporary, reactionary response to anti-racism or racial equity interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Biological Essentialism: White Nationalism, Health Disparities Data, and the Cultivation of Lay Agnotology

  Social Problems · 2023-03-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  Scholars and practitioners position health disparities research as an important tool for redressing race-based inequities and re-conceptualizing racialized health outcomes in non-essentialist terms. Given this context, we explore a peculiar phenomenon, which is the circulation of such research among white nationalists. We discover that white nationalists incorporate and respond to health disparities research not solely to defend racist and essentialist reasoning, but also to project a discourse that indicts the science establishment for ostensibly incorporating liberal politics, corrupting inquiry, and obfuscating understanding of biology in the name of anti-racism or social constructionism. We term this practice "lay agnotology," as it involves white nationalists capitalizing on their role as non-specialists to charge the health disparities field and its expert contributors with an alleged set of institutionalized biases that produce ignorance about the 'truth' of race. We connect this finding to the literature on racialized ignorance, as it demonstrates how stories about the institutional nature of science can be as central to myth-making about race as stories about the scientific nature of people.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Trying to make race science the “civil” science: charisma in the race and intelligence debates

  Theory and Society · 2022 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen - a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve - and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exhuming Violent Histories

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Criminology
  • History
  • Psychology

  Nicole Iturriaga offers an ethnographic examination of how Spanish human rights activists use forensic methods to challenge dominant histories, reshape collective memory, and create new forms of transitional justice. Exhuming Violent Histories sheds new light on how science and technology intersect with human rights and collective memory.

  PublisherDOI

• La comunicación para el desarrollo en REDEPS

  Revista Internacional de Comunicación y Desarrollo (RICD) · 2022-01-17 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  El presente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar el rol de la comunicación en los procesos de producción de capital social al interior de la Red de Economía Popular y Solidaria de Calderón (REDEPS). La organización, ubicada en la parroquia rural de Calderón, está formada por 12 emprendimientos: entre cajas solidarias de ahorro y crédito, emprendimientos productivos y artesanales. Desde una perspectiva multidisciplinaria, retoma conceptos de la comunicación para el desarrollo, capital social y economía social y solidaria para presentar un estudio de caso. Utiliza una la metodología cualitativa apoyada en la etnografía de la comunicación, cuya recolección de datos está guiada por una matriz de variables de análisis, que ha sido organizada en cuatro elementos constitutivos del capital social de la siguiente forma: relaciones sociales, prácticas, recursos y beneficios. El documento constituye una reflexión sobre el desarrollo, las formas cooperativas de organización y las prácticas comunicacionales que fortalecen y posibilitan la continuidad del proyecto económico social y solidario, que el en Ecuador, ha tomado el nombre de Economía Popular y Solidaria. Finalmente, esta es una invitación a retomar el estudio de la comunicación como creadora de tejido social y eje principal para la implementación de modelos de desarrollo pensados desde la gente y no para la gente.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The necropolitical spectrum

  Human Remains and Violence An Interdisciplinary Journal · 2022-04-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article sets forth a theoretical framework that first argues that necropolitical power and sovereignty should be understood as existing on a spectrum that ultimately produces the phenomenon of surplus death – such as pandemic deaths or those disappeared by the state. We then expound this framework by juxtaposing the necropolitical negligence of the COVID-19 pandemic with the violence of forced disappearances to argue that the surplus dead have the unique capacity to create political change and reckonings, due to their embodied power and agency. Victims of political killings and disappearance may not seem to have much in common with victims of disease, yet focusing on the mistreatment of the dead in both instances reveals uncanny patterns and similarities. We demonstrate that this overlap, which aligns in key ways that are particularly open to use by social actors, provides an entry to comprehend the agency of the dead to incite political reckonings with the violence of state action and inaction.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kushan Dasgupta

  University of Louisville

  6 shared

• Aaron Panofsky

  6 shared

• Derek S. Denman

  4 shared

• Bernard Koch

  Kellogg's (Canada)

  1 shared

• Abigail C. Saguy

  Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2018

• MA, Sociology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2012

• BA, Sociology

  University of California, Berkeley

  2009