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...
Edward Martin is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and the FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Fellow. His research explores how abolitionist activists build non-carceral forms of safety through community mental health initiatives. His current project examines the relationship between abolitionist organizing practices and community mental health alternatives to incarceration in Oakland, California. Through this research, he aims to understand how tensions between carceral logics and abolitionist organizing practices shape the...
Jesús Nazario (he/they) is a PhD candidate in the Ethnic Studies Department with a Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization at the University of California, Berkeley. Broadly, they interrogate Indigenous cultural change and permanence in North America, with particular focus on traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous notions of citizenship. Their interdisciplinary dissertation analyzes changes in Nahua identity and cultural practices, specifically regarding Indigenous maize farming practices, that have occurred over the last 30 years as a result of...
Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco
Coryna Ogunseitan (she/any) is a doctoral candidate in medical anthropology in the joint program between UCSF and UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on interventions to support people experiencing climate anxiety and climate grief. Working comparatively across EcoDharma spaces in Western convert Buddhism and the African-led, international climate grief support organization Sustaining All Life, this research asks how race and geography shape emotional responses to climate change, and inform conceptualizations of healing and psychological wellness within the context of...
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley
Natasha Shannon is a PhD candidate in Society & Environment in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management department. Her dissertation research examines different agricultural rural development strategies in Central Appalachia, especially those falling under the banners of AgTech and regenerative agriculture. Situated in the broader context of a “just transition” for the region, her work analyzes the labor and agricultural practices of these two approaches and also untangles their varying financial and social networks, with a specific focus on the influence,...
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley
Deibi Sibrian is a Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Development Engineering. A first-generation Indigenous Salvadoran scholar of Maya Ch’ortí lineage, Deibi studies the socio-environmental consequences of digital transformation. Deibi’s dissertation, Digital Transformations, Physical Costs, examines how digital infrastructure—including AI, data centers, Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency mining—reshapes land, energy systems, public health, and more-than-human ecologies. Grounded...
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...
