Aukeem Ballard is a former secondary public-school educator, organizer, and school leader whose pedagogy and practices remain grounded in critical love. Aukeem is currently a PhD student in the Berkeley School of Education with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Aukeem's current research focuses on the gendered and racialized educational experiences, conditions, and practices that constitute (and are shaped by) phenomena such as love, hope, healing, and courage as mediated through, thereby informing, often oppressive and dehumanizing spaces. Aukeem seeks to highlight and...
Tak-Huen Chau is a PhD candidate in political science and MA candidate in economics. He is interested in social identities and political behavior in general. Currently, he is working on projects that utilize formal theory and surveys to explain dominant group attitudes on national identity, assimilation, and bilingual education.
Xavier Durham (he/him) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley whose interests revolve around policing, surveillance, state violence, punishment, inequality, and urban sociology. His current project focuses on the precarious convergence between formerly-incarcerated people and neoliberal security practices in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, examining how the policed become the police as they navigate a constrained labor market. Previously, he has done extensive work on police use of force during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as well as the constitutional...
Akilah Favors is an energetic free-spirited activist who loves to smile. She is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at UC Berkeley who researches race, class, social movements, gentrification, and the politics of inclusion. Her work investigates how Black middle-class organizers mobilize low-income renters against urban displacement rooted in neoliberalism and systemic racism in Atlanta, GA. She employs urban ethnography and in-depth interviews to analyze how both practices of division and solidarity influence the sustainability of Blackness in the city. Her work contributed to a national...
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley
Alejo's work sits at the intersection of political ecology, riverine territorialities, and environmental justice. His dissertation analyzes the histories, dynamics, and struggles to make and remake the riverine landscape of the Upper Magdalena River (UMR), Colombia, and its political implications for peasant and fisherfolk communities. Alejo asks how green capital’s attempts to stabilize, disrupt, or rework land-water interfaces shape and are shaped by peasants' and fisherfolk's longstanding struggles against dispossession. Native to the UMR region, Alejo uses community-engaged...
Caylee Hong is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she researches urban oil production in the Los Angeles Basin. Her dissertation examines the ways that diverse stakeholders navigate the decommissioning and redevelopment of century-old oil fields in the heart of cities, including Los Angeles and Long Beach. She has published research on infrastructure finance, the environment, law, and citizenship in Antipode and Anthropological Theory. Prior to Berkeley,...
I study the emergence of—and relationship between—propertied and territorial ways of relating to land, specifically in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I am particularly interested in how non-federal actors - including - state governors, migrants, and Indigenous communities - contesr federal hegemony and assert sovereignty over the space of the border through property frameworks.
My undergraduate research at the University of Arizona examined housing inequality in Tucson’s manufactured housing communities and historically Mexican neighborhoods, especially through the mechanism of the...
Jonathan is a PhD student in City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design with Designated Emphases in Global Metropolitan Studies and Political Economy. His current research examines the governance of urban public space in New York City, Oakland, and Paris, as well as international organizing and advocacy movements around social housing. A critical, interdisciplinary social scientist committed to the study of urban inequalities, statecraft, and the production of space, Jonathan has previously conducted work on the effects of gentrification in Chicago Public...