Grad Student - ISSI

Cathy Hu

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Cathy Hu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her work sits at the intersection of punishment and society, social movements, and political sociology. Currently, she is working on a qualitative project examining criminal and racial justice activism in the Bay Area. This project focuses on the county criminal court as a new site of intervention for social movements from across the political spectrum. Before starting at Berkeley, Cathy worked as a research analyst at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center and received a BA in Sociology from Rice...

Victoria Huynh

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Josephine Ingram

Berkeley School of Education, UC Berkeley

Josephine (Josie) Ingram (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture cluster at UC Berkeley's School of Education. Her research interests include LGBTQ+ studies in education, creative writing pedagogy, queer literacy frameworks, digital learning spaces, and artificial intelligence in education. Her current project explores how informal learning spaces can support literacy development and identity formation for transgender and gender-expansive individuals.

Previously, Josie taught English, creative writing, and film in the Los Angeles Unified School...

Margot Jeanne Cohen

Geography, UC Berkeley

Margot Jeanne Cohen (she/her) is a member of the Climate Futures Lab, the Disabled Ecologies Lab, and the Latin American SocioNatures Working Group. Her research brings together racial environmental geographies, feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), and critical participatory methods to examine the political ecologies of climate change adaptation in the Andean highlands of Ecuador and in Western Massachusetts. Her dissertation project engages Participatory Action Research (PAR) as both a subject and methodology to address the coalitional politics of community...

Pilar Jefferson

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Pilar Jefferson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies whose work focuses on the intersections of Black and Native racial representation and creative interventions in US museums. She received her BA in Art History and Native American Studies from Vassar College in 2015 and her MA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley in 2022. Before matriculating at UC Berkeley, Pilar worked as a museum educator in New York City at institutions including the Museum of the City of New York and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her dissertation combines archival research with participant...

Jessica Jiang

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Sara Johnsen

Sociology, UCLA

Makaela Jones

Education, UC Berkeley

Makaela Jones (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the School Psychology program at Berkeley School of Education and identifies as a radical Black feminist and youth advocate. She currently works as a school psychologist in Oakland Unified School District and is eager to persist as a scientist-practitioner. Her dissertation research focuses on the praxis and pedagogy of Black women educators and how they create liberatory spaces for BIPOC children. Makaela analyzes how school adults reimagine their power to destabilize the logic that assumes that children are...

David Joseph-Goteiner

Sociology, UC Berkeley

David Joseph-Goteiner is a digital ethnographer broadly studying the morals and politics that animate emerging technologies, and the consequences of digitalization for individuals and social institutions. David’s dissertation examines the meanings and motivations behind platform work, building on theoretical discussions of dependence, embeddedness, and fairness. David’s work has been published in Socius, Sociology of Religion, and Management and Organization Review

Jennifer Kaplan

French, UC Berkeley

Jennifer (she/elle/ella) works across the fields of (socio)-linguistics, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist theory. To date, she has conducted research on New York City English, language attitudes and ideologies in the French press, and non-binary Romance language varieties. Her dissertation project applies the lenses of queer theory and transfeminism alongside methods of linguistic ethnography to examine the language practices and linguistic attitudes and ideologies within francophone queer, trans, and non-binary communities in Montreal. Through a combination of...