Grad Student - CER

Jane Angar

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Jane (Mango) Angar is pursuing her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political violence and disability politics, focusing on how disability influences state consolidation, citizenship, and economic marginalization in former British colonies. Her dissertation project aims to delve into the history and institutionalization of disability rights movements within these regions, particularly in Africa. The project is based on interviews with disability rights activists and archival research in Zambia, Kenya,...

Aukeem Ballard

Education, UC Berkeley

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 Candidate 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...

Christian Caballero

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Christian Caballero is a Political Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on American politics and political behavior. In particular, he studies the ways in which social networks influence processes of political persuasion and democratic deliberation, as well as how political ideologies develop within subcultures. He holds a B.A. in Politics and Sociology from New York University and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Joanna Cardenas

African American Studies Department, UC Berkeley

Joanna Cardenas is a doctoral student in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, she received a dual B.A. in African American Studies and Legal Studies with honors from Cal. Her research interests are situated at the nexus of critical carceral studies, Disability Studies, and Black Feminist Thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender. Through a close analysis of contemporary California prisons, Joanna’s work broadly focuses on how systems of confinement inform our understandings around gender,...

Tak-Huen Chau

Political Science, UC Berkeley

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

Sociology, UC Berkeley

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

Sociology, UC Berkeley

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...

Benjamin Fields

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Cameron Enyu Gan

Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley

Cameron Enyu Gan is pursuing their Ph.D. in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program. They have held a policy internship with the International Detention Coalition and research assistantships with PrisonPandemic at UC Irvine and the Govern Through Contagion project at the National University of Singapore. Prior to graduate school, Cameron received B.A.s from UC Irvine, graduating magna cum laude in Criminology, Law and Society, and East Asian Cultures.

Cameron’s research interests lie at the intersection of immigration, the carceral state,...

Jesus Alejandro Garcia

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...