Grad Student - CER

Britt Dawson

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Britt Dawson is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. Their dissertation project, “Life on the Threshold: Islam, Migration, and Crisis at the Mexico–U.S. Border,” examines life at Latin America’s only shelter for Muslim migrants, where Mexican Muslims and migrants strive to build refuge as they are shaped and constrained by the forces of the border in Tijuana. Britt holds an MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and served as assistant editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

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...

Josh Feng

Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Josh Feng is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines the cultivation of “tropicality” and the luxury fruit market in Japan, focusing on the supply chain of the Taiyo no Tamago (“Egg of the Sun”) mango from Miyazaki Prefecture. Through ethnographic fieldwork with farmers, marketers, and consumers, his project explores how technologies of cultivation, infrastructures of distribution, and rhetorics of regional revitalization and locality converge to mediate production and consumption, generate value, and produce place —...

Benjamin Fields

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Valentina Flores

Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley

Valentina Flores is a graduate student at Berkeley Law's Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Ph.D. Program. They hold a joint Political Science and Human Rights Bachelor of Arts (BA) Degree from Bard College. Before JSP, Valentina worked at various criminal justice nonprofits, most notably as an editorial Fellow for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing program. Valentina has written about how practices of punishment and surveillance erode the civil rights of the formerly incarcerated and is broadly interested in spatial racism, incarceration, and citizenship. Currently, they are...

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...

Jeremy Gottlieb

UCSF-UCB Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Jeremy Gottlieb is an MD-PhD student in medical anthropology. They study changing ideas of the human and subjectivity through ethnographic research with neuropsychiatric researchers, clinicians, and those living with Deep Brain Stimulation as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses.

Hasan Henry

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Hasan Henry (he/him) is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lie in issues of racial modernity, Black masculinities and gender, and the sociology of sexuality, situated within an interdisciplinary framing that includes DuBoisian Sociology, Black Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Hasan's current project concerns the social antecedents to the formation of sexual desire, investigating how contemporary sexual practices, desires, and representations of Black sexuality have been shaped by the colonial encounter and its afterlives—...