Lisa Ng is a PhD candidate in the Ethnic Studies Department with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She interrogates the relationships between the racialized histories of waste and technology and their potential roles in social movements. Her current research examines how grassroots urban beautification projects in Asian (American) communities in Oakland, California, can represent new imaginations of relationality, resistance, and futurity. Beyond academia, she is an experienced multilingual community educator and...
Kieren Rudge is a PhD candidate in the Society and Environment Division of the Environmental Science, Policy, & Management Department at UC Berkeley. Their work is grounded in critical race theory, political ecology, and critical Pacific islands studies. Their dissertation focuses on how racialized social-political structures differently impact Pacific communities facing climate injustice. This project uses a collective case study examining marginalization and coalitional climate activism in the state of California and the U.S. territory of Guåhan. This research examines how the...
Derek Wu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley (Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies) broadly exploring the effects of race and class inequalities on democracy in cities. His dissertation project uses archival work and more than 75 ethnographic interviews spanning five languages to explore how community organizing practices changed after the 1960s in an extremely diverse neighborhood of Oakland, CA, known as the Murder Dubs. He compares types of civil society organizations (such as churches and neighborhood councils) and...
