Sandra Oseguera Sotomayor is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Born in Mexico City, she holds a BA and MA in Latin American Studies, with a second MA in Anthropology. Her research focuses on long-term human-environmental interactions, examining traditional agricultural practices among the Indigenous Zapotec people in the Northern Highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico. She investigates the impact of these practices on environmental resilience and cultural persistence within these communities. Sandra's academic interests include decoloniality, discussions on food sustainability and...
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....
Karen Villegas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Karen’s dissertation analyzes the ways in which economic and language ideologies work together to socialize aspiring U.S. citizens to be literate in a ‘neoliberal’ ideation of citizenship. The context of the study is an adult, English as a Second Language (ESL), naturalization course with a focus on the social organization of the practices, the ideologies indexed in these practices, and the ensuing formations of literacies produced in these settings. Karen received her M...
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...
Mo'e Yaisikana is a member of Cou (Indigenous Taiwanese) and a doctoral student at the School of Social Welfare. His intellectual interests concern care equity for Taiwan's older adults. He examines the construction and hindrance of care policies and service delivery system and aims to unravel a comprehensive, systematic, intersecting dynamic form of power to help explain challenges for Indigenous elders' accessibility to care service. His research includes the development of care service techniques, the intersection between governmental service and political democratization, and...
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,...
Ashley Zhou is a student of the Joint Doctoral program in special education with UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. Her research focuses on structures of race, class, gender, and disability in special education through the role of the paraprofessional. Analyzing historical archives, she examines the labor formation of paraprofessionals and special education teachers in the aftermath of Brown. Her work also incorporates ethnography to examine the consequences of this labor formation for contemporary challenges in special education. Through this investigation of educational...
