2024 - 2025 CRG Student Research Grantees

NEENA ALBARUS (Spring 2025) 
Department: Social Welfare

Project Title:  Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Jamaica

This study explores the factors driving commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in Jamaica. Drawing on multiple research methods, from qualitative interviews and surveys to archival research, this work seeks to discuss the ways in which children may become vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Through the lens of Caribbeanist theory and neoliberal critiques, it explores how historical legacies of colonialism and contemporary global economic structures continue to shape the lives of children in the Caribbean. The research will also look beyond the socio-economic, to consider the cultural and historical forces that have rendered certain bodies, and in particular children’s bodies, expendable. This exploration seeks to inform policy and advocacy efforts in Jamaica, while also contributing to global discussions on child protection within tourism-dependent economies.

LARISSA BENJAMIN (Spring 2025) 
Department: Public Health

Project Title:  A Mixed-Methods Approach to Understanding the Structural Drivers of Neighborhood Cardiovascular Exposures in Rural Communities in the Stroke Belt

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the U.S., killing 1 in 3 adults. Given the disproportionate burden of CVD in rural areas, particularly in the southeastern region of the United States, my dissertation investigates the impact of distinctive structural processes of disinvestment in rural areas that influence neighborhood opportunity and vulnerability. Studies show that living in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods is associated with worse CVD outcomes, but have been conducted mainly in urban populations, leaving ~60 million rural residents under-studied.

My mixed-methods dissertation focuses on neighborhood-level measures of disinvestment, social vulnerability, and racial and economic isolation to investigate associations with CVD risk factors leveraging the Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal (RURAL) Study. Additionally, I will conduct 24 qualitative interviews with rural leaders and activists working to improve their neighborhoods. I interpret study findings through historical and critical social science frameworks to understand how structural factors shape CVD risk geographically and demographically, and to amplify community-based solutions. Findings from this research may help to identify macrosocial drivers of cardiovascular risk in rural communities.

BRITTANY CAMPBELL (Spring 2025)
Department: Public Health

Project Title:  Strengths-Based Intervention Design Considerations for Black Women with Type II Diabetes and Hypertension

African American women face a disproportionate burden of Type II diabetes and hypertension, compounded by structural inequities, chronic stress, and gendered racism. Despite growing awareness of these intersecting challenges, few public health interventions are designed with Black women’s lived experiences, cultural values, and definitions of healing at the center. This project seeks to address that gap by developing a strengths-based, culturally responsive intervention protocol to reduce psychological distress and improve social connectivity among Black women managing a chronic health condition. Guided by Black Feminist Thought, Superwoman Schema, and Community Cultural Wealth, the research will leverage literature, lived experience, and participatory intervention design strategies. By honoring Black women’s cultural assets, community knowledge, and resilience, this work shifts away from deficit-based models and toward healing-centered, community-engaged solutions. The expected outcome is an intervention protocol that can inform sustainable public health strategies and contribute to a broader shift in how systems support the mental and physical health of African American women.

JOANNA CARDENAS (Fall 2024)
Department:  African American Studies

Project Title:  Girlz in the Hood: How Black and Latinx Women Navigate the Streets of South Central Los Angeles

South Central Los Angeles has a long history of male-dominant gang affiliations, categorizing the city of Los Angeles as the gang capital of the nation. This led to excessive surveillance and sky-rocketing rates of male incarceration since the 1980s, making L.A. men's jails an epicenter of mass incarceration. Research is lacking, however, around the social and cultural understandings of Black and Latinx women in South Central’s carceral landscape. This project examines the following questions: 1.) How does the carceral landscape of Los Angeles shape the experiences of Black and Latinx women in this specific community? 2.) How is the social well-being of women in South Central being affected by institutional and interpersonal policing practices in their everyday lives? This project will explore the various modes of survival that Black and Latinx women engage in when dealing with the various forms of state violence women are vulnerable to in inner-city communities, specifically in South Central Los Angeles. Informed by Black Feminist Epistemology, this project seeks to incorporate ethics of care and social well-being, to acknowledge the storytelling of their collective experiences as a form of knowledge production that is valuable and critical in understanding the complexities of inner-city women’s experiences.

IVON GOMEZ VARGAS (Fall 2024)
Department:  Graduate School of Education

Project Title:  Leading the Way: Leadership Strategies for Teacher Recruitment and Retention in California’s Pre-Kindergarten

Universal Pre-kindergarten (UPK) presents an opportunity to address systemic barriers in Early Childhood Education (ECE), such as racism and sexism, which hinder its recognition and importance in the broader educational field (Haslip & Gullo, 2018). ECE is crucial for supporting young children's growth and building a strong foundation for their future. Research shows that teacher-child interactions significantly impact children's outcomes (Pianta, 1999), but teachers' needs are often unmet. ECE teachers, predominantly women of color in California, face barriers like low compensation, limited growth opportunities, and lack of benefits (Couse & Recchia, 2015a; Gomez et al., 2015). The state's new Transitional Kindergarten (TK) initiative has led to the replacement of women of color by White women in classrooms (Castillo et al., 2023a, 2023b). These inequities contribute to a growing shortage in the field, affecting teacher recruitment and retention (McLean et al., 2021). This case study, using semi-structured interviews, explores how California's UPK leaders address teacher recruitment and retention. It also examines how these leaders define high-quality education and the strategies they endorse to improve recruitment and retention. The findings suggest that ECE leaders can be transformational agents, fostering practices that meet teachers' needs and help repair and improve the field.

ARIANNA KHMELNIUK (Fall 2024)
Department:  Art Practice

Project Title:  Performing Otherness

Performing Otherness: Artistic research explores the understudied role of language around olfaction in film and media, offering a novel perspective on how scent communicates bonding and separation. It investigates how mainstream culture uses olfaction to perpetuate otherness, harmful language, and hate speech through an interdisciplinary method that bridges sensory ethnography and cinema theory.

Beginning in 2020, Arianna has developed an archive of film stills and the collection of subtitles analyzed through the lens of cultural studies, revealing the complex interplay between smell and language in shaping social and political dynamics. This ongoing project, culminating in a BAMPFA exhibition in Spring 2025, takes the form of art installation, book, performance, and web. 

JIN HYUNG LIM (Fall 2024)
Department:  Graduate School of Education

Project Title:  Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (TSEL) Competencies as Job Resources for Teachers of Color: Their Associations with Teacher Well-Being and Classroom Management

This study explores the role of transformative social and emotional learning (TSEL) competencies as job resources for teachers of Color, examining their associations with teacher well-being and classroom management skills. Guided by the job demands-resources and prosocial classroom models, this research hypothesizes that TSEL competencies promote well-being and improve classroom management skills. Additionally, it investigates whether TSEL competencies mitigate the adverse effects of job demands and whether teacher well-being mediates the relationship between TSEL competencies and classroom management. Given the unique challenges faced by teachers of Color, including microaggressions and racial marginalization, this study further examines whether these relationships are more pronounced for teachers of Color compared to their White counterparts. By highlighting the potential of TSEL competencies to address inequities in teacher experiences and foster a more equitable educational environment, this research provides critical insights for supporting teachers’ well-being and professional growth, particularly in diverse and marginalized communities.

KENDRICK MANYMULES (Fall 2024)
Department:  Geography

Project Title:  Reconfiguring Diné Worlds: Land, Development, and Sovereignty in the Navajo Nation

My project addresses histories of how land came to be rendered an object of economic development in the Navajo Nation. By tracing the techniques and tactics by which the Navajo Nation has come to rely on the alienation of land via extraction of natural resources, the project argues that the making of natural resources is connected to the making of social and political relations. Support from CRG will aid in the completion of a chapter in my dissertation around gendered labor of Diné women weavers as their relations with sheep and land were altered by sheep breeding improvement experiments. I examine the centrality of the question of land as it relates to questions of dispossession, capitalist development, and Indigenous sovereignty.

CRISTINA MENDEZ (Spring 2025)
Department: School of Education

Project Title:  Reclaiming Mam Language and Culture: Maya Mam Women’s leadership and activist pedagogies across Guatemala, México, and the United States

My research centers on how Maya Mam women engage in leadership and pedagogical innovations across the hemisphere. Previous research has focused on the importance of language and cultural revitalization for Indigenous communities across the hemisphere, especially in ancestral territories in response to settler colonial violence that targets Indigenous people, their ways of knowing and language. Some of these studies specify how Indigenous communities are organizing for the vitality of their languages, cultures, and well-being in the diaspora. As an extension of these bodies of work, my dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic and collaborative project that utilizes testimonio, pláticas, and participant observation to understand the language and cultural activism of Maya Mam women in the US, Mexico, and Guatemala. This dissertation creates a new body of literature that explores how Mam women’s activism creates multilingual educational spaces that shape identity and subjectivity, solidarity-based political action, and learning with/in Mam communities across ancestral and diaspora locations.

CHERISE MICHELLE (Spring 2025) 
Department: Ethnomusicology

Project Title:  The Black Terrarium: Exploring Black Micro-Festival Culture in Los Angeles as an Articulation of Repair

This project explores Black micro-festival culture in post-pandemic Los Angeles as a fertile ground for economic empowerment, cultural archiving, and relational repair within Black communities. Through my personal experiences attending these micro-festivals, I became interested in how I might read these kinds of spaces as Terrariums of Blackness, or ecosystems that help sustain communal practices of well-being.

Drawing on Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis’s concept of “relational repair”, I examine how quotidian Black practices of being and knowing might flourish here. I am interested in locating (near) utopic, successful examples of the repair within four micro-festivals (Black Market Flea, Black on the Block, Everyday People, and Hotwater Cornbread Southern Festival).

I hope to address the following questions: 1) How might Black women operate as the sustaining force within this Black micro-festival culture? 2) What histories do Black vendors draw from, and how do their creations function as living archives? 3) How does music shape the soundscape of Black joy here? 4) Finally, who is left out of these spaces, and what might their absence reveal about the complexities and costs of relational repair within contemporary Black cultural ecosystems?

MARIA PETTIS (Spring 2025)
Department: Geography 

Project Title:  Landscape as Archive: Ecology, Memory, and Iconography of Jim Crow Cemeteries in the Mid-Mississippi Bottomlands

Are rural Black cemeteries across the Mississippi River Alluvial Bottomlands materially eroding- victims of time and depopulation, or are they being made to disappear out of sight and mind? How? / Why? & To What End? This project centers the space of the cemetery, surveying the material culture, ethnobotany, and community memory embedded in place, to contextualize questions about the politics of contemporary rural Black erasure, endurance, and to problematize our ways of seeing. Support from CRG will aid in the completion of in-person fieldwork, a ground truthing of sorts, that will support the second and third chapters of my dissertation. This work argues that addressing the ecology, memory, and iconography of cemeteries in the Delta/Bottomlands today will help us understand how to trace rural black life but will also help us uncover the conditions and iconographic placemaking discourses that are leveraged in order to make new frontiers today. Such as those actively calling for and imagining the Delta/Bottomlands region as another ‘California’ and the Next Agrotechnological Frontier.

ANKITA RAKHE (Spring 2025)
Department: School of Education

Project Title:  The Collision of Free Speech & Inclusion: Student Affairs Women of Color Leaders and Institutional Influence

For colleges and universities, the conflicts between free speech and inclusive practices during the 2023–2024 academic year were unprecedented: captured in congressional hearings, in content produced by news agencies, and in the vocal demands of students. University leadership, faculty, and students took the spotlight; however, there was little mention of student affairs staff. As universities grapple with a better understanding of the interplay of free speech with inclusive practices, Student Affairs staff take the helm, with the burden falling disproportionately on women of color. The research will explore how women of color student affairs leaders who enact free speech policies potentially impacting students’ belonging, can shape institutional commitments to equity and inclusion. It will do so by specifically understanding how they navigate the interplay, how they help support students navigating the interplay, and how they influence their institutions towards more equitable practices in its response.

AJUNG RYOO (Spring 2025) 
Department: Anthropology

Project Title:  The Room: Pain and Precarity of Sex Workers in Seoul, South Korea

This experimental documentary film grapples with sex workers’ bodies and spaces in Seoul. Despite its marked economic and social visibility, sex work remains illegal in South Korea; thus, sex workers operate within a precarious gray zone of selectively-condoned criminality, and complex layers of crises constantly fracture their worlds and manifest as bodily pain, destruction, and madness. However, discourses on sex workers are overwhelmed with moral and political discussions on trafficking, sexual violence, STDs, trauma, addiction, patriarchal male desires, gender performance, or women’s agency in a liberal sense. The interviews I conducted for this project are full of testimonies that are irreducible to these themes, and they illustrate how the dramas and vulnerabilities from sex work are merely part of a more overarching and chronic fragility that threads one’s whole life. Thus, in this project, I refuse to give a narrative closure through orienting towards acceptance or salvation – I insist on the materiality, fleshliness, and messiness of sex workers' experiences, and let those guide my visual experiment.

CRYSTAL SONG (Fall 2024)
Department:  Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

Project Title:  Restaging the Model Minority in Asian American Ballroom Dance

While Asian Americans remain peripheral to the U.S. imaginary of ballroom dancing, our growing presence on the dance floor itself—a space where hegemonic relations have long been reproduced as well as disrupted—contests this marginal status. Indeed, when this group entered mainstream awareness after the tragic mass shooting at a majority-Chinese studio in Monterey Park, California, one local instructor told the New York Times, “In this country, it would be the Asian American communities that have kept ballroom dancing alive.” My dissertation brings sustained ethnographic focus to one such community—the Asian American dancesport scene in New York City—whose members are not only unstudied players in an industry that remains predominantly white, but ones who unsettle its racially charged hierarchies of skill, prestige, and belonging. It asks how model minorityness—which I treat not only as a racist trope but also, in erin Khuê Ninh’s phrase, a “framework for personhood”—is both reinforced and reorganized in dancesport. I consider how the industry’s conditions of racialized non-belonging amplify the sense of “perpetual near-failure” Mimi Khúc defines as endemic to model minority life. I also attend to the forms of community and critique dancers enact through collaborative movement, ultimately advancing embodied relation as a means of surviving and remaking white supremacist spaces.

ALEX K. TORREZ (Fall 2024)
Department:  Sociology

Project Title:  THRIVING: Black & Brown Trans/nonbinary Community Retention & Organizing

Across the United States trans/queer activists have called the period of aggressive legislative rollbacks and the expansion of anti-trans legislation a ‘genocide’ targeting trans/queer individuals and their families. Although many of the supporters and members of the trans/queer rights movements in the late 2010s & early-2020s ultimately laud the progress these leaders have helped create, many have raised concerns that the public face of the movement is still White. Similar to other social movements, public leaders at the core of the trans-rights movement hold the most privileged social positions within the community: white individuals from a higher socioeconomic background. Thus far, sociological studies have demonstrated how race, gender and class status are leveraged differently to organize, subvert, and progress social movements but these studies have remained primarily focused on binary bodies, and experiences. I conduct this study in the San Francisco Bay Area, a space rich with both queer history and a continually active nesting ground for black and brown power coalition building, to ask the questions: How do community members mobilize around ‘trans’ initiatives in the context of historically exclusive black/brown spaces while negotiating identity and maintaining physical boundaries?

SIMON(E) VAN SAARLOOS (Fall 2024)
Department:  Rhetoric

Project Title:  Existence Without Defense

When attacked as trans, should one really defend oneself as trans? Trans people have been tasked to embody a radical break with the norm. I argue that trans does not need to be the radical escape it is dreamed to be in academic and popular discourse. When the marker of transgender is understood as a coherent group of people, white transgenders tend to claim a proximity to risk and precarity that is formulated by Black, brown and native trans people. Instead of engaging with anti-trans rhetoric by formulating a way out, a utopian horizon and a trans otherwise, trans people could just exist and refuse the violence of white progressive existence.

For my research, I turn to the doctor’s waiting room and the clinic’s surgery table. Once accepted into this liminal space, you cannot return to what was before, but there is also no real going forward – only a disappointing surrender to the same old binary gender system, enforced state (mis)recognition, bathrooms that don’t fit, more medical violence and, at best, liberal celebrations of your existence. What if you never want to come out of the waiting room, never wish to appear legibly gendered to current registers of recognition?