Grad Student - ISSI

Sara Johnsen

Sociology, UCLA

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...

Pritika Khatri

School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

Pritika Khatri is a public health researcher with experience in adolescent health and health equity initiatives across Nepal, Nigeria, India, and the United States. Born and raised in Nepal, she served as a Research Fellow for the WHO South-East Asia Region, focusing on adolescent health and intersectionality in Nepal and supervising the first National Tuberculosis Survey of Nepal. She also led establishing healthcare center in Nigeria through Harvard Lown Scholar Program. She is the first female and first person from Nepal to pursue a DrPH at UC Berkeley, where her research examines youth...

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,...

Alexa Kurmanov

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Alexa Kurmanov is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Their research integrates anthropology, Black Studies, and Central Asian Studies and provides an interdisciplinary analysis of trans communities in Kyrgyzstan and the Kyrgyz diaspora. Their dissertation analyzes Kyrgyz trans life in the wake of Russian imperialism and Soviet modernization, focusing on palimpsestic material and ideological remains within law, medicine, and regimes of documentation. These institutional structures, alongside national discourses of gender and nationality, often portray the...

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.

Jonathan Landeros-Cisneros

Berkeley School of Education, UC Berkeley

Jonathan Landeros-Cisneros is a doctoral candidate in the UC Berkeley School of Education. His research examines how First-Generation Students of Color navigate belonging and exclusion in higher education and whether they might understand themselves not as impostors seeking institutional validation, but as infiltrators, strategic agents who enter hostile institutions with transformative intentions and community accountability. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, abolition university studies, and mixed-methods inquiry, the project integrates QuantCrit analyses of national longitudinal data...