[5] His dissertation was titled "Hunters, Herders, Cultivators, and Traders: Interaction and Change in the Kgalagadi, Nineteenth Century.
[7] Prior to Yale and Columbia, Okihiro was the director of Asian American Studies at Cornell University.
[8][9] He was recruited to Columbia partially as a result of a 1996 undergraduate student protest calling for an ethnic studies department to provide counterbalance to what was perceived to be a biased pro-Western core curriculum.
[11] Okihiro was the originator of "social formation theory," which he defined as the forms and processes of power in society to oppress and exploit.
By forms, he meant the discourses and practices of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation, and by processes, he referred to the articulations and intersections of those social categories.