Grad Student - CER

Caylee Hong

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

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,...

AJ Kurdi

Ethnic Studies & Women’s and Gender Studies, UC Berkeley

AJ Kurdi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation research is a comparative study on different forms of ethnic minority queer organizing in various social contexts in Europe and North America, and how they shape the priorities and political orientations of mainstream LGBTQI movements, laws and public policies in Europe and North America. The project uses mixed qualitative and quantitative methods including document analysis, correlational analysis,...

Andrea Lara-Garcia

Geography, UC 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...

Zhuofan Li

Sociology, University of Arizona

Jonathan Marty

City & Regional Planning, UC Berkeley

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...

Farnam Mohebi

Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

Farnam Mohebi is a PhD student at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and a researcher in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco. She has previously earned her MD and MPH degrees. Her research focuses on the intersection of professionals and emerging technologies, drawing from the fields of medical sociology, organizational theory, and science and technology studies. She is particularly fascinated by the evolving relationship between physicians and artificial intelligence, the phenomenon of physician influencers, and...

Bernardo Moreno Peniche

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Bernardo is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology. He studies the (dis)locations of tropicality in relation to the emergence of zoonoses and vector-borne diseases in the Global North. He focuses on Chagas, a parasitic disease transmitted by an insect vector, that has gained its epidemiological relevance in the US through its association with human migration from Latin America despite growing evidence of local transmission cycles that have continuously been part of US landscapes. He asks about the effects that framing Chagas disease as a foreign threat have on public health policy and clinical...

Janiya Peters

University of California, Berkeley

Janiya Peters is a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information advised by Deirdre Mulligan. Her work explores the ways in which generative text-to-image models compromise visual creators’ intellectual property rights, and how visual creators adopt resistance strategies to retain agency over their intellectual property, labor and compensation. She identifies sites of dispute between stakeholders, and discerns individual and collective action towards repossessing appropriated works. Her work proposes policy interventions at the intersection of copyright, data labor and creative...

Prami Sengupta

Social Ecology, UC Irvine

Natasha Shannon

Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley