Grad Student - CER

Shadi Anello

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Shadi Anello is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines how recognition and belonging are constituted within contexts of protracted displacement, with particular attention to affect, subjectivities, relationality, and the porosity of social and symbolic boundaries. More broadly, she explores how logics of inclusion and exclusion shape social worlds, communal imaginaries, and possibilities for recognition across relations of alterity. Her scholarship engages epistemological approaches that seek to integrate theory with...

Jane Angar

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Jane (Mango) Angar is pursuing her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political violence and disability politics, focusing on how disability influences state consolidation, citizenship, and economic marginalization in former British colonies. Her dissertation project aims to delve into the history and institutionalization of disability rights movements within these regions, particularly in Africa. The project is based on interviews with disability rights activists and archival research in Zambia, Kenya,...

Ghaleb Attrache

Ghaleb Attrache is a sociology PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. He studies the relationships between culture, knowledge, embodiment, and power, especially in the context of environmental stewardship and human-nonhuman interactions. Ghaleb’s dissertation examines efforts among governmental, non-governmental, and Indigenous fire and land management organizations in California to practice and promote intentional burning. Based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the dissertation compares the different ways fire practitioners understand fire and land’s aliveness, and how this...

Aukeem Ballard

Education, UC Berkeley

Aukeem Ballard is a former secondary public-school educator, organizer, and school leader whose pedagogy and practices remain grounded in critical love. Aukeem is currently a PhD Candidate in the Berkeley School of Education with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Aukeem's current research focuses on the gendered and racialized educational experiences, conditions, and practices that constitute (and are shaped by) phenomena such as love, hope, healing, and courage as mediated through, thereby informing, often oppressive and dehumanizing spaces. Aukeem seeks to highlight...

Isabella Brown

Education, UC Berkeley

Isabella C. Brown is a PhD candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education. Her research focuses on systemic barriers impeding agency in decision-making spaces for Black parents navigating the special education system. Her work builds upon a desire to inform policy and disrupt the understudied phenomenon of inequitable special education milieus to yield truly collaborative parent-school partnerships for the most marginalized. She believes ethnographic research is critical to the contextualization of how Black and Brown parents traverse the undercurrent of special education...

Christian Caballero

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Christian Caballero is a Political Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on American politics and political behavior. In particular, he studies the ways in which social networks influence processes of political persuasion and democratic deliberation, as well as how political ideologies develop within subcultures. He holds a B.A. in Politics and Sociology from New York University and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Joanna Cardenas

African American Studies Department, UC Berkeley

Joanna Cardenas is a doctoral student in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, she received a dual B.A. in African American Studies and Legal Studies with honors from Cal. Her research interests are situated at the nexus of critical carceral studies, Disability Studies, and Black Feminist Thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender. Through a close analysis of contemporary California prisons, Joanna’s work broadly focuses on how systems of confinement inform our understandings around gender,...

Tak-Huen Chau

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Tak-Huen Chau is a PhD candidate in political science and MA candidate in economics. He is interested in social identities and political behavior in general. Currently, he is working on projects that utilize formal theory and surveys to explain dominant group attitudes on national identity, assimilation, and bilingual education.

Kathleen Corpuz

School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

Kathleen Corpuz is a DrPH student at the School of Public Health and a Filipina settler in Hawai'i, deeply committed to fostering interethnic collaboration to improve public health systems for Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. With a background in strengthening research capacity and community services through university partnerships, she supports grassroots movements that prioritize collective solidarity. Kathleen actively engages in community-led research practices, advocating for food sovereignty by restoring lo'i kalo and promoting wrap-around services for justice-...

Britt Dawson

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Britt Dawson is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. Their dissertation project, “Life on the Threshold: Islam, Migration, and Crisis at the Mexico–U.S. Border,” examines life at Latin America’s only shelter for Muslim migrants, where Mexican Muslims and migrants strive to build refuge as they are shaped and constrained by the forces of the border in Tijuana. Britt holds an MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and served as assistant editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.