Grad Student - ISSI

Joshua Acosta is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies whose research interests are in Asian and Asian American studies, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, and Filipino American and Philippine studies. He is a recipient of the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship and was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and California State University Sally Casanova Scholar. His dissertation, “State of Insanity: Medicalizing Madness and the Imperial Subject in the Philippines, 1898-1965,” research traces how the interplay between colonial bureaucrats, Philippine medical scientists, mental illness patients,...

Neena Albarus is a doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research experience spans structural violence, community resilience, and the intersections of policy and public health, with particular attention to underrepresented and historically marginalized regions in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Neena’s work draws on multi-method approaches, and she has contributed to research on violence prevention, substance use, and community development. Her publications include peer-reviewed journal articles and technical reports that...

Shadi Anello is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines how recognition and belonging are constituted within contexts of protracted displacement, with particular attention to affect, subjectivities, relationality, and the porosity of social and symbolic boundaries. More broadly, she explores how logics of inclusion and exclusion shape social worlds, communal imaginaries, and possibilities for recognition across relations of alterity. Her scholarship engages epistemological approaches that seek to integrate theory with...

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...