Grad Student - ISSI

Aukeem Ballard

Education, UC Berkeley

Aukeem Ballard is a former secondary public-school educator, organizer, and school leader whose pedagogy and practices remain grounded in critical love. Aukeem is currently a PhD Candidate in the Berkeley School of Education with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Aukeem's current research focuses on the gendered and racialized educational experiences, conditions, and practices that constitute (and are shaped by) phenomena such as love, hope, healing, and courage as mediated through, thereby informing, often oppressive and dehumanizing spaces. Aukeem seeks to highlight...

Jacob Barton

Berkeley School of Education, UC Berkeley

Jake Barton is a former high school science teacher and a PhD Candidate at the Berkeley School of Education. He works with K-12 teachers and students throughout the East Bay, seeking to support their engagement with environmental and climate justice. As part of this work, he has helped facilitate an ongoing professional development program for teachers called OTACA (Oakland Teachers Advancing Climate Action) for the past several years. His dissertation is focused on this program and a design-based collaboration with several teachers and the Lawrence Hall of Science, through which students...

Larissa Benjamin

Public Health, UC Berkeley

Larissa Benjamin is a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) candidate at UC Berkeley in the School of Public Health. Her research examines the structural and historical factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease risk in Southeastern rural communities, employing rigorous quantitative and qualitative research methods. Using geospatial and statistical methods, she maps patterns of neighborhood-level disinvestment and segregation by rurality across 14 states in the Southeastern US and investigates associations between disinvestment and cardiovascular disease risk factors and...

Gardiner Brown

Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Gardiner Brown is a doctoral candidate working at the intersection of human geography and the environmental humanities. His research examines inequities in the United States’ emergency management system and their relations to environmental and social injustices. In particular, he studies the ways in which disability, the body, and vulnerability are framed in emergency management policy and how these frames shape practice. His dissertation research is focused on extreme heat adaptation policy in Oregon. Gardiner’s research seeks to understand the politics embedded within the practice of...

Isabella Brown

Education, UC Berkeley

Isabella C. Brown is a PhD candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education. Her research focuses on systemic barriers impeding agency in decision-making spaces for Black parents navigating the special education system. Her work builds upon a desire to inform policy and disrupt the understudied phenomenon of inequitable special education milieus to yield truly collaborative parent-school partnerships for the most marginalized. She believes ethnographic research is critical to the contextualization of how Black and Brown parents traverse the undercurrent of special education...

Jacqueline Brown

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Jacqueline Brown (she/her) is a PhD student in the Sociology department at University of California, Berkeley. She is a mixed-methodologist who is interested in access to higher education, organizational change, and socioeconomic mobility. Her research primarily uses quantitative, computational, and interview methods. She is currently working on a longitudinal analysis of college admissions policies related to income and class background and a study of invisible pedagogies among teachers in New York City. Additionally, she is a graduate student researcher on a project that evaluates a data...

Christian Caballero

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Christian Caballero is a Political Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on American politics and political behavior. In particular, he studies the ways in which social networks influence processes of political persuasion and democratic deliberation, as well as how political ideologies develop within subcultures. He holds a B.A. in Politics and Sociology from New York University and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Brittany Campbell

Public Health, UC Berkeley

Brittany Campbell is a strengths-based public health scholar and St. Louis native whose work seeks to understand what is working in order to improve what is not. Grounded in the values of community, hope, and joy, her research focuses on identifying and amplifying individual and collective strengths that support health and well-being. Her dissertation centers the lived experiences of African American women managing chronic health conditions, with the goal of improving healthcare navigation and creating more responsive, equitable healthcare systems. Through community-engaged and human-...

David Cao

Computer Science, UC Berkeley

David Minh-Duy Cao is a PhD Student in Computer Science with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Engaging the intersection of programming languages research, human-computer interaction, and ethnic studies, their work imagines computing interfaces that embody a Third World politics of self-determination. As part of their work, David has been involved in creating a digital archive around the beginnings of the Asian American movement of the 60s and 70s, in collaboration with some of AAPA's founding members. Their research practice also encompasses designing experimental programming tools in...

Joanna Cardenas

African American Studies Department, UC Berkeley

Joanna Cardenas is a doctoral student in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, she received a dual B.A. in African American Studies and Legal Studies with honors from Cal. Her research interests are situated at the nexus of critical carceral studies, Disability Studies, and Black Feminist Thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender. Through a close analysis of contemporary California prisons, Joanna’s work broadly focuses on how systems of confinement inform our understandings around gender,...