Taesoo Song is a Ph.D. Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His research leverages quantitative and geospatial methods to investigate how housing policies and planning influence residential mobility and neighborhood change for low-income and minority households in American cities. Taesoo's dissertation examines the housing experiences of Asian Americans, challenging the prevailing narrative that they face minimal barriers in the housing market. His work focuses on: 1) ethnic, class, and locational variations in Asian homeownership, 2) the...
James Sun is a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley focusing on Asian American environmental history. They are currently researching the history of Asian rice in the U.S., including how rice came to the U.S., the communities and inter-ethnic relations that formed around growing, cooking, and eating rice, and the environmental impact of growing rice in the U.S. James formerly taught on a Fulbright Fellowship in South Korea, worked at an environmental nonprofit focused on industrial decarbonization, and graduated from Yale with a degree in Statistics and a degree in...
Nathan Anthony Tilton, MA, uses he/him pronouns. His disability pronouns are: service dog handler, chair user, neurodivergent, and disabled veteran. He is the Associate Director at UC Berkeley's Disability Lab and a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology. His research interests encompass disability anthropology, veteran health, critical disability studies, post colonial studies, crip time, and military biopolitics. Nate's research examines the ways in which institutions disable people, focusing on disabled veterans on Guam and the afterlives of former U.S. military bases in the Philippines....
Alex K. Torrez (They/Them) is a Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Berkeley. They are broadly interested in questions at the nexus of Identity Classifications such as race, gender, and sexuality, Medical Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Organizations. Currently, these interests have led Alex to explore understandings of care in clinical settings, genomics, and the development of recruitment strategies for scientific study and organ donation.
Derek Wu is a PhD student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley (Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies). He is using historical, ethnographic, and action research methods to research how racial minorities use religion to support low-income urban neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area, paying special attention to how these behaviors are shaped by secularization and decolonization narratives in the U.S. His research has been supported by the Asian American Research Center, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and the Asian Pacific Americans Religious...
Chun-Chi (Sarah) Yang is a student in the School Psychology PhD Program in Berkeley School of Education. Before graduate school, she was a high school teacher in Taiwan for 20 years. After resigning from her teacher position, she attended the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Psychology Department at UC Berkeley. She then worked as a project coordinator in Hinshaw Lab and Family and Culture Lab at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is a second-year PhD student focused on adolescent research. As a teacher, she observed an upward trend of sleep problems and mental health difficulties in adolescents,...
Alan Yeh is a Ph.D. candidate in French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies refugitude aesthetics, memory, care, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora. His research has appeared in L’Esprit Créateur and has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation as well as Berkeley’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His dissertation uncovers transdiasporic approaches to a politics of care in displacement narratives entangled in histories of colonialism...
Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley
Jaclyn Zhou is a PhD candidate in the department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Her research interests include fan studies, Asian and Asian American popular culture, digital technology and embodiment, tourism studies, and race and empire. Her dissertation explores the relationship between anime-inspired tourism and national and racial identity construction in the Japanese and global anime fandom. She is also a founding member of the Media Education Research Lab (MERL), a UC Berkeley-based lab developing methods for measuring and...
