Dr. Amy Champ Researcher · Educator · Writer

I study how ideas become institutions—and how people reshape both.

My work moves between feminist theory, performance, yoga, technology, and community life. Across three decades, the question has stayed constant: who gets to shape the systems that shape us?

01 / Inquiry

What I’m thinking about now

AI is not only a technical project. It is a cultural story, a political arrangement, and a philosophical test.

  • AI through feminist theory

    Reading the promises and anxieties around artificial intelligence through power, embodiment, narrative, and social difference—not only capability.

  • Community Compute

    Developing a public-interest framework for how communities might share in the value created by the data, energy, land, labor, and infrastructure that make large-scale computation possible.

  • Whose language? Whose values?

    Following the politics of underrepresented languages in AI, especially the relationship between global access, local knowledge, and the people whose work makes language systems possible.

  • The discursive and the recursive

    Bringing poststructural analysis into conversation with the fear of recursive self-improvement: what changes when a discourse appears to become an actor?

02 / Throughline

A life across fields

The work has changed forms—from theater to policy, classrooms to campaigns—but it has always been about culture in motion.

1995–1996

Performance as public work

As a Fulbright Fellow in Zimbabwe, I worked with a women’s theater group using performance to open conversations about women, development, health, and community life.

1996–1999

Arts across borders

At the Japan–U.S. Partnership for the Performing Arts, I helped administer intercultural exchange and connect artists, funders, and institutions.

2000–2003

Technology and government

As a senior policy researcher at the Center for Digital Government, I designed research on how public institutions use technology and interviewed government technology leaders nationwide.

2003–present

Teaching across worlds

I have taught government, philosophy, religion, performance, social studies, mathematics, and English—from college seminars to public-school and refugee classrooms.

Research foundation

Performance Studies + Feminist Theory

My PhD at UC Davis examined women and yoga in the United States, bringing together embodiment, spirituality, activism, and social power. The dissertation was a finalist for the National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize.

03 / Practice

Research with its feet on the ground

I am most at home where a big idea meets an actual room full of people.

Ask what an idea has to do with the community. That is not an afterthought—it is a research method.
Across scholarship, teaching, organizing, and public service

I bring a scholar’s pattern recognition, an educator’s attentiveness, and an organizer’s sense of what it takes to move from language to action.

That has meant convening conference panels, designing learning experiences, supporting immigrant and refugee students, organizing across rural communities, delivering wildfire relief, and advocating at the state capitol.

It also means staying with the tension between observer and participant: the researcher inside the system, the performer inside the analysis, the teacher learning from the room.

04 / Writing

Selected public work

Writing is where the threads meet: theory with ordinary life, embodiment with politics, and personal practice with shared structures.

Published essay Karma Yoga: Political Strategy, Spiritual Strength LA Yoga Magazine · Karma yoga as spiritual practice and political activism Author archive Essays on yoga, activism, education, and culture Elephant Journal Guest essay Bhakti yoga, devotion, and everyday practice Gita Talk · 2010 Public service A record of community leadership in Amador County Campaign archive Academic archive Curriculum vitae 2015 archival edition