Grad Student - ISSI

Derek Wu

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Derek Wu is a PhD student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley (Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies). He is using historical, ethnographic, and action research methods to research how racial minorities use religion to support low-income urban neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area, paying special attention to how these behaviors are shaped by secularization and decolonization narratives in the U.S. His research has been supported by the Asian American Research Center, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and the Asian Pacific Americans Religious...

Mo'e Yaisikana

School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley

Mo'e Yaisikana is a member of Cou (Indigenous Taiwanese) and a doctoral student at the School of Social Welfare. His intellectual interests concern care equity for Taiwan's older adults. He examines the construction and hindrance of care policies and service delivery system and aims to unravel a comprehensive, systematic, intersecting dynamic form of power to help explain challenges for Indigenous elders' accessibility to care service. His research includes the development of care service techniques, the intersection between governmental service and political democratization, and...

Chun-Chi Yang

School of Education, UC Berkeley

Chun-Chi (Sarah) Yang is a student in the School Psychology PhD Program in Berkeley School of Education. Before graduate school, she was a high school teacher in Taiwan for 20 years. After resigning from her teacher position, she attended the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Psychology Department at UC Berkeley. She then worked as a project coordinator in Hinshaw Lab and Family and Culture Lab at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is a second-year PhD student focused on adolescent research. As a teacher, she observed an upward trend of sleep problems and mental health difficulties in adolescents,...

Alan Yeh

French, UC Berkeley

Alan Yeh is a Ph.D. candidate in French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies refugitude aesthetics, memory, care, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora. His research has appeared in L’Esprit Créateur and has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation as well as Berkeley’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His dissertation uncovers transdiasporic approaches to a politics of care in displacement narratives entangled in histories of colonialism...

Alexis Atsilvsgi Zaragoza

Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

Alexis Atsilvsgi is a Cherokee and Chicana Master of Public Policy student at the Goldman School. She previously served on the California Community College’s Board of Governors and the University of California Board of Regents. Alexis works at the intersection of higher education, supply chain/logistics infrastructure, legal geographies, surveillance policy, and geopoetics to understand geographies of hope in capitalist-entrenched rural landscapes, as well as spatial-driven governance structures. Her past projects include hope-mapping carceral, logistics, and education pathways in rural...

Anna Zaret

Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley

Anna Zaret is a Ph.D. Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. She has research interests in medical and scientific evidence, criminal procedure, and tort law, where she combines her expertise in political economy and political theory to approach contemporary problems related to police violence, health policy, and social inequality. She was previously a fellow at the UCSF – UC Law Consortium on Law, Science, and Health Policy and clerked for the Hon. Laurel Beeler in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and. She received her J.D. magna cum laude...

Tianyue Zhang

Asian Studies, UC Berkeley

Ashley Zhou

Berkeley School of Education, UC Berkeley

Ashley Zhou is a student of the Joint Doctoral program in special education with UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. Her research focuses on structures of race, class, gender, and disability in special education through the role of the paraprofessional. Analyzing historical archives, she examines the labor formation of paraprofessionals and special education teachers in the aftermath of Brown. Her work also incorporates ethnography to examine the consequences of this labor formation for contemporary challenges in special education. Through this investigation of educational...

Jaclyn Zhou

Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Jaclyn Zhou is a PhD candidate in the department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Her research interests include fan studies, Asian and Asian American popular culture, digital technology and embodiment, tourism studies, and race and empire. Her dissertation explores the relationship between anime-inspired tourism and national and racial identity construction in the Japanese and global anime fandom. She is also a founding member of the Media Education Research Lab (MERL), a UC Berkeley-based lab developing methods for measuring and...