I am Kyle Haines, a Ph.D. Candidate in the UCSD Political Science program. I was born in Santa Barbara and grew up in the Santa Ynez Valley, 20 miles north. I attended undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, taking a year abroad and living in Dublin, Ireland, attending Trinity College Dublin. I graduated in 2006 and traveled for a year through South America and the Iberian Peninsula before returning in debt to begin working for the State Parks in Santa Barbara. Eventually, I moved to the East Bay, living in Berkeley, El Cerrito, and Oakland where I taught as a substitute teacher in public high schools and waited tables at night and on weekends.
I have lived in San Diego since 2009 when I entered to PhD program in Political Science here at UC San Diego. I plan on finishing in June 2016. Drawing on and refining radical environmental theories from the 1960s and 1970s which sought the unification of political and ecosystem boundaries, I look at the practical ecological effects of political decentralization (in its different forms and contexts). My examples come from California, the San Diego/Tijuana Conurbation, Southern Mexico, and Bolivia. Although I am a political theorist by training, I also borrow heavily from comparative politics and many distinct disciplinary approaches. Beyond my own writing, I am focused on teaching and projects here in San Diego and throughout our binational community (both here in San Diego County and immediately across the national border with Mexico in Tijuana).
