Jesús Gutiérrez is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research, teaching and writing cluster around themes related to mediation, performance and embodiment; religion, ritual, and the secular; and temporality, memory and historical consciousness in Black Atlantic societies. His dissertation analyzes the concepts of fugitivity, ancestrality and multiplicity that are activated and disseminated in Afro-Brazilian aesthetic traditions. His ethnographic research suggests that what is at stake in the cultural politics of certain popular and folk art forms of the...
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. 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 incapable, hyper-dependent, and uncivilized. As a child therapist and school psychologist, Makaela refuses to normalize the ableist, anti-Black...
Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, UC Berkeley Law
Mitzia E. Martinez Castellanos is a doctoral candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law. Her research explores the lingering effects of being undocumented and experiencing legal violence after an immigrant gains a legal status. She pays particular attention to how legal violence affects immigrant’s legal consciousness, identities, sense of community, and willingness to engage with the law. Before graduate school, Mitzia worked at an Oakland community-based research institute, conducting bi-national projects in collaboration with immigration...
Adriana P. Ramírez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests revolve around migration, citizenship, Latin America, political sociology, and race and ethnicity. The influence of growing up as a migrant student between Mexico and the U.S. is evident in her work, which explores transnational migration dynamics. Her current work examines how young return migrants adapt to different spheres of Mexican society and formulate their identity and sense of belonging across contexts of reception in the states of Oaxaca and...
juleon robinson is an organizer, community educator, and PhD Student in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research analyzes the relationship between race and property in Bay Area housing geographies, with a specific focus on the persistence of Black housing geographies as sites of temporariness and dispossession. His current project examines the 2017 demolition of the Las Deltas public housing complex in North Richmond, California, to reckon with the role of public housing policy in the ongoing fragmentation of Black geographies in California’s East Bay....
Ángel Mendiola Ross (they/he) is a PhD candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley who conducts research at the intersection of (sub)urban sociology, race and inequality, policing, incarceration and housing. Their current project examines the relationship between prison proliferation and ethnoracial residential segregation in metropolitan U.S. during the post-civil rights period. His empirical work on racial and renter threat in California suburbs was recently published in Social Problems. Ángel’s work has received generous support from the Berkeley...
Taesoo Song is a Ph.D. Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the nexus of housing policy, neighborhood change, and residential outcomes for low-income and minority households, particularly in high-cost areas. Taesoo's dissertation reassesses the prevailing narrative that Asian Americans face minimal barriers in the housing market. He investigates the ethnic, class, and locational diversity among Asian Americans and how these factors influence their homeownership rates and housing burdens. He then examines the impact of...
