Grad Student - ISSI

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...

Michelle Katuna

Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Michelle Katuna (Ashkenazi Jewish and non-Jewish European settler descent) is a graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy & Management. Michelle's research focuses on ongoing collaborations between Tribal nations, private landowners, and local environmental agencies and organizations to develop guidance for, and empirical evidence to support, Indigenous stewardship and co-stewardship on private lands. Tribal nations are important actors in developing place-based solutions to environmental challenges, yet their decision-making authority over ancestral lands is often compromised...

Anatol Klass

History, UC Berkeley

AJ Kurdi

Ethnic Studies & Women’s and Gender Studies, UC Berkeley

AJ Kurdi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation research is a comparative study on different forms of ethnic minority queer organizing in various social contexts in Europe and North America, and how they shape the priorities and political orientations of mainstream LGBTQI movements, laws and public policies in Europe and North America. The project uses mixed qualitative and quantitative methods including document analysis, correlational analysis,...

Josefina Valdes Lanas

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Josefina Valdes Lanas researches religious imagination and mystical practices in contemporary Catholicism in its relation to neo-liberal economics and secular citizenship. Using the methods of linguistic anthropology, she analyzes spiritual exercises deeply entrenched in Christian theology that are being transformed by the moral governance of liberal ideologies.

Andrea Lara-Garcia

Geography, UC Berkeley

I study the emergence of—and relationship between—propertied and territorial ways of relating to land, specifically in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I am particularly interested in how non-federal actors - including - state governors, migrants, and Indigenous communities - contesr federal hegemony and assert sovereignty over the space of the border through property frameworks.

My undergraduate research at the University of Arizona examined housing inequality in Tucson’s manufactured housing communities and historically Mexican neighborhoods, especially through the mechanism of the...

Jessica Kari Law

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Jessica Law is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She is broadly interested in racial formation and knowledge, the state, identity politics, and social movements. Her dissertation project focuses on the construction of “racial equity” as a framework for understanding and addressing inequality. This project specifically examines the instantiations of “racial equity” in San Francisco’s local governance. Jessica holds a master’s degree in sociology from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and comparative race studies from the University of Chicago.

Zhuofan Li

Sociology, University of Arizona