Grad Student - CER

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

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...

Alexandra Gessesse

African American and African Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley

Alexandra Gessesse is a cultural worker, daughter of the diaspora, and PhD Candidate in the Department of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Alexandra’s dissertation examines how Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants navigate historically Black neighborhoods in the U.S., forging new forms of belonging through the lenses of place, politics, and popular culture. As a visual storyteller, Alexandra uses photography and video to capture the everyday moments where these complex negotiations of identity unfold—revealing how Blackness is performed, contested, and reimagined...

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—...

Cathy Hu

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Cathy Hu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her work sits at the intersection of punishment and society, social movements, and political sociology. Currently, she is working on a qualitative project examining criminal and racial justice activism in the Bay Area. This project focuses on the county criminal court as a new site of intervention for social movements from across the political spectrum. Before starting at Berkeley, Cathy worked as a research analyst at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center and received a BA in Sociology from Rice...

Josephine Ingram

Berkeley School of Education, UC Berkeley

Josephine (Josie) Ingram (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture cluster at UC Berkeley's School of Education. Her research interests include LGBTQ+ studies in education, creative writing pedagogy, queer literacy frameworks, digital learning spaces, and artificial intelligence in education. Her current project explores how informal learning spaces can support literacy development and identity formation for transgender and gender-expansive individuals.

Previously, Josie taught English, creative writing, and film in the Los Angeles Unified School...

Margot Jeanne Cohen

Geography, UC Berkeley

Margot Jeanne Cohen (she/her) is a member of the Climate Futures Lab, the Disabled Ecologies Lab, and the Latin American SocioNatures Working Group. Her research brings together racial environmental geographies, feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), and critical participatory methods to examine the political ecologies of climate change adaptation in the Andean highlands of Ecuador and in Western Massachusetts. Her dissertation project engages Participatory Action Research (PAR) as both a subject and methodology to address the coalitional politics of community...