Josefina Valdes Lanas researches religious imagination and mystical practices in contemporary Catholicism in its relation to neo-liberal economics and secular citizenship. Using the methods of linguistic anthropology, she analyzes spiritual exercises deeply entrenched in Christian theology that are being transformed by the moral governance of liberal ideologies.
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...
Alexis Wood is a PhD student in the Department of Geography and the Berkeley Center for New Media. She researches the growing intersections between climate change, digital geographies, and rural socio-political movements, with a particular interest in current secessionist state movements in the United States. In this, her project asks how participants in these types of movements incorporate heightened levels of climate anxiety with existing feelings of rural marginalization in both physical and digital landscapes to better understand the rural/urban divide.
