Grad Student - CER

Jimena Perez

Geography, UC Berkeley

Jimena Perez is a community-engaged scholar, NSF GRFP Fellow, and Geography Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation explores the L.A. River—known to the Tongva as paayme paxaayt—as a site of memory, resistance, and repair. Raised in Southeast Los Angeles, she witnessed the River’s confinement in concrete, mirroring the struggles of nearby working-class communities. Rather than centering loss, her ethnographic research highlights the visions and practices of residents across L.A. County who challenge dominant planning narratives and reimagine infrastructure. Jimena’s...

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Elena Peterman

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Elena Peterman is a PhD student in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She researches the political and affective dimensions of encounters with industrial toxicants (especially PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. Her ethnographic work traces the ways so-called 'forever chemicals'— in their persistence and expansive proliferation— variously derange or reinforce racialized regimes of property and citizenship in a rapidly transforming corner of the U.S. South.

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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...

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Irene Franco Rubio

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Irene Franco Rubio is a scholar-activist, organizer, and first-generation Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and New Media. Her research examines intersectional coalition building and cross-cultural solidarity within multiracial social movements, focusing on how and why coalitions emerge and sustain themselves amid the challenges of movement siloing in the U.S. Southwest. Grounded in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Sociology, she employs a combination...

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Meriam Salem

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Meriam Salem is a PhD student investigating the intersection of behavioral health and legal systems. Her research draws on the Duboisian question, "how does it feel to be a problem?" Currently, her work investigates how governments manage behavioral health and the encroachment of national security logics in healthcare systems. She was recently awarded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholars fellowship.

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Henry Sales

School of Education, UC Berkeley

Henry Leonel Sales Hernández is an Indigenous Maya Mam educator, researcher, and doctoral student in the School of Education at UC Berkeley. Born and raised in San Juan Atitán, Guatemala, and currently living in Oakland, California, his work is rooted in language justice, cultural affirmation, and educational equity. His research and work focuses on the revitalization of the Mam language through early childhood education, storytelling, and community-based practices. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Henry studies how Mam toddlers, youth, and their families in Oakland engage with books and...

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Maya Sapienza

Geography, UC Berkeley

Maya is a PhD student in Geography who studies the relationships between gentrification, Black identity formation, bureaucracy, geographies of urban justice, and struggles over public (and private) space. In particular, she investigates how these entanglements might be instructive for alternative futures. She looks at the relationship between local and federal government policies that have unevenly impacted Black neighborhoods, and the ways Black residents resist physical and cultural displacement in their attempts to reclaim their neighborhoods. Historically, local...