Grad Student - ISSI

Martha Ortega Mendoza

School of Education, UC Berkeley

Martha Ortega Mendoza is the proud daughter of two former restaurant cooks. Currently, Martha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation builds upon the scholarship focused on undocumented students by documenting and uplifting the academic, social, and financial experiences of undocumented graduate students. Through her research, Martha identifies how institutional agents (e.g., staff, administrators, and faculty) can attract, retain, and help undocumented graduate students complete their graduate studies. In...

Anna Palmer

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Anna Palmer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the convergence of extractivism, (post)colonial development, and the climate crisis in the Caribbean through a qualitative and spatial lens. Her current project focuses on political decision-making and resistance to oil extraction in Guyana through content analysis and interview methods. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Occidental College.

Catherine Park

School of Education, UC Berkeley

Catherine Park is a Ph.D. candidate in Education at the University of California, Berkeley with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. Catherine's research centers on how Mandarin-English dual immersion programs offered in private and public/charter schooling interact with not only sociospatial politics of urban spaces, but also transnational movements of capital, peoples, and power. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and Psychology from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in China Studies from Zhejiang University, and has taught in NYC public high schools, where she...

Joohyun Park

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Joohyun Park is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, she studies gender, medicine, law, and social movements. Her dissertation examines how the South Korean courts' interpretation of victims' medical records in sexual violence cases has evolved over time, analyzing the changing perceptions of victimhood through the lenses of agency and vulnerability.

Sarah Payne

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Lauren Pearson

Geography, UC Berkeley

Lauren R. Pearson is a PhD Candidate in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her M.A. from the University College London and her B.A. from New York University. Her dissertation focuses on the phenomenon of illegally set wildfires in Sicily through an analysis of the history of social, political-economic, and environmental crisis in Sicily. Her research has been supported by the Trinity College’s Research Grant in Modern Italian History, The 'FLAS' Fellowship, The Berkeley-Naples Fellowship at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, and...

Clara Pérez Medina

Geography, UC Berkeley

Clara Pérez Medina (they/them) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. They are a geographic filmmaker, studying the relationship between race, place, and representation through the modalities of oral history, film, and photography. Currently they are working on a collaborative film project with Bay Area Black housing justice organizers considering the historical racial political economy of Oakland and the intergenerational lines of care that have sustained the city. They have an M.A. in Sociology from the University of California...

Jimena Perez

Geography, UC Berkeley

Jimena Perez is a community-engaged scholar, NSF GRFP Fellow, and Geography Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation explores the L.A. River—known to the Tongva as paayme paxaayt—as a site of memory, resistance, and repair. Raised in Southeast Los Angeles, she witnessed the River’s confinement in concrete, mirroring the struggles of nearby working-class communities. Rather than centering loss, her ethnographic research highlights the visions and practices of residents across L.A. County who challenge dominant planning narratives and reimagine infrastructure. Jimena’s...

Janiya Peters

University of California, Berkeley

Janiya Peters is a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information advised by Deirdre Mulligan. Her work explores the ways in which generative text-to-image models compromise visual creators’ intellectual property rights, and how visual creators adopt resistance strategies to retain agency over their intellectual property, labor and compensation. She identifies sites of dispute between stakeholders, and discerns individual and collective action towards repossessing appropriated works. Her work proposes policy interventions at the intersection of copyright, data labor and creative...

Kameswari (Kamu) Potharaju

UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program

Kamu is a medical and graduate student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. Her research interests focus on the integration of social care into clinical care, with an emphasis on increasing basic needs access for historically underresourced communities.