Grad Student - ISSI

Amanda Su

English, UC Berkeley

James Sun

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

James Sun is a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley focusing on Asian American environmental history. They are currently researching the history of Asian rice in the U.S., including how rice came to the U.S., the communities and inter-ethnic relations that formed around growing, cooking, and eating rice, and the environmental impact of growing rice in the U.S. James formerly taught on a Fulbright Fellowship in South Korea, worked at an environmental nonprofit focused on industrial decarbonization, and graduated from Yale with a degree in Statistics and a degree in...

Emily Fjaellen Thompson

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Nathan Tilton

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Nathan Anthony Tilton, MA, uses he/him pronouns. His disability pronouns are: service dog handler, chair user, neurodivergent, and disabled veteran. He is the Associate Director at UC Berkeley's Disability Lab and a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology. His research interests encompass disability anthropology, veteran health, critical disability studies, post colonial studies, crip time, and military biopolitics. Nate's research examines the ways in which institutions disable people, focusing on disabled veterans on Guam and the afterlives of former U.S. military bases in the Philippines....

Rosario Torres

Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Alex Torrez

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Alex K. Torrez (They/Them) is a Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Berkeley. They are broadly interested in questions at the nexus of Identity Classifications such as race, gender, and sexuality, Medical Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Organizations. Currently, these interests have led Alex to explore understandings of care in clinical settings, genomics, and the development of recruitment strategies for scientific study and organ donation.

Karen Villegas

School of Education, UC Berkeley

Karen Villegas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Karen’s dissertation analyzes the ways in which economic and language ideologies work together to socialize aspiring U.S. citizens to be literate in a ‘neoliberal’ ideation of citizenship. The context of the study is an adult, English as a Second Language (ESL), naturalization course with a focus on the social organization of the practices, the ideologies indexed in these practices, and the ensuing formations of literacies produced in these settings. Karen received her M...

Charlotte Wang

Sociology, Columbia

Katherine Wolf

Environmental Science (ESPM), UC Berkeley

Alexis Wood

Geography, UC Berkeley

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.