Ghaleb Attrache is a sociology PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. He studies the relationships between culture, knowledge, embodiment, and power, especially in the context of environmental stewardship and human-nonhuman interactions. Ghaleb’s dissertation examines efforts among governmental, non-governmental, and Indigenous fire and land management organizations in California to practice and promote intentional burning. Based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the dissertation compares the different ways fire practitioners understand fire and land’s aliveness, and how this...
Kathleen Corpuz is a DrPH student at the School of Public Health and a Filipina settler in Hawai'i, deeply committed to fostering interethnic collaboration to improve public health systems for Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. With a background in strengthening research capacity and community services through university partnerships, she supports grassroots movements that prioritize collective solidarity. Kathleen actively engages in community-led research practices, advocating for food sovereignty by restoring lo'i kalo and promoting wrap-around services for justice-...
Sierra Edd (Diné) is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is Tł’ógi, born for the Kinłichii’nii people and grew up in Durango, Colorado / Four corners. Her research interests are in Indigenous gender and sexuality, culture, storytelling, futures/futurity, and digital media. She is also a 2020 recipient of the Ford Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and a coordinator for the Indigenous Sound Studies working group and Berkeley’s Center for New Media Indigenous Technologies Program.
Pilar Jefferson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies whose work focuses on the intersections of Black and Native racial representation and creative interventions in US museums. She received her BA in Art History and Native American Studies from Vassar College in 2015 and her MA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley in 2022. Before matriculating at UC Berkeley, Pilar worked as a museum educator in New York City at institutions including the Museum of the City of New York and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her dissertation combines archival research with participant...
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley
Michelle Katuna (Ashkenazi Jewish and non-Jewish European settler descent) is a graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy & Management. Michelle's research focuses on ongoing collaborations between Tribal nations, private landowners, and local environmental agencies and organizations to develop guidance for, and empirical evidence to support, Indigenous stewardship and co-stewardship on private lands. Tribal nations are important actors in developing place-based solutions to environmental challenges, yet their decision-making authority over ancestral lands is often compromised...
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...
