2019 - 2020 CRG Student Research Grantees

BRYCE BECKER (Spring 2020)
Department:  Education

Project Title:  The Coloniality of Statewide Literacy Testing and #OptOut as a Decolonial Option

In my dissertation, I explore the opt-out movement in statewide testing, a grassroots movement in which parents/guardians choose not to have their children participate in statewide testing. Informed by decolonial theory on language, literacy, and institutionalized knowledge (e.g., Lugones, 2010; Mignolo, 2000; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012; Urciuoli, 1995), I conduct a social media ethnography to critically analyze the discourse found in social media posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Focusing on the movement within California, I explore motives for opting out, and how opt-out pushes against the role that standardized testing plays in reinforcing colonial ideologies about language, knowledge, and in turn, being (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009). In doing so, I examine whether this resistance movement represents a possibility towards decolonizing literacy from within the U.S. education system.

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REE BOTTS (Spring 2020)
Department:  African Diaspora Studies

Project Title:  I See You Sis: an Exhibition of Black Womxn Healing

My dissertation project is an ethnographic curation of Black women’s healing spaces. I ask, how do creatively curated sites of care expand possibilities for Black women’s wellness? I use art-based methodologies to map Black women’s creative processes of designing physical and metaphysical sites of care against a backdrop of ever pervasive antiBlackwomaness that impedes upon our access to holistic well-being. Using a deeply reflexive approach, I engage a Black feminist poetics of geography to trace how adjacent sites of healing become mapped onto each other, from the body to the home, the sister circle to the astral plane, the city to the interior self space. Hence, my work is, more broadly, an unconventional narration of Black women’s spatial interventions within urban environments.

I See You Sis: an Exhibition of Black Womxn Healing is a week long art exhibit that serves as a focus-group style site of data collection for my dissertation. One of a plethora of community centered events I host and attend, this space is produced through what I call creative space making as methodology, in that it merges a Black feminist ethic of care with a geographic investment in communal gathering and exchange.

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ALEX BROSTOFF (Spring 2020)
Department:  Comparative Literature

Project Title:  Bodies of Theory: Auto-Relational Writing Across the Americas

My dissertation investigates subversive literary reactions to two disciplinary developments: the rise of high theory and the institutionalization of programs in the study of gender and race in the Americas. On their margins, I claim, queer forms of writing begin to emerge in the 1980s. Rather than parody how philosophy falters beyond the ivory tower (as the theory novel has), I show how this corpus redresses theory’s elision of an embodied subject, melding theory with life writing to critique the structural conditions under which knowledge is produced. My study, which combines intellectual history with close readings of Argentine, Brazilian, and American texts, compares the sites of schooling and broader social movements from which this corpus emerges and upon which it acts. From Third World Feminism’s “theory in the flesh” to Brazilian outlaw poetry’s “body in heteronyms” to Euro-American crossings of “autotheory,” I maintain that these marginal writing cultures react against their schooling by forging culturally and historically-specific modes of fleshing out an “I” that is always already relational. At the crux of my study are the relational effects of theory on self-figuration and the ways in which embodied subjects contest what constitutes theory today.

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WILLOW FRYE (Spring 2020)

Department:  Public Health - Joint Medical Program

Project Title:  Transgender perspectives on the use of detention for asylum seekers and its impact on their health and wellbeing

Transgender asylum seekers carry with them a unique experience of immigration detention, which lies at the nexus of multiple marginalities on the axes of gender and race/ethnicity. They experience cumulative exposure to transphobia, xenophobia, violence, and trauma before, during, and after their migration. Legal consciousness is a framework rooted in a commonsense understanding of the law and its impacts on everyday life. Legal consciousness is understood to be situated in and contingent upon the social contexts within which it is shaped along the axes of race, gender, class, and legal status. Because studies of legal consciousness focus on ordinary people and how they view law and its efficacy, this line of research has broad implications for justice, legitimacy, and ultimately, social change. I will conduct qualitative interviews with formerly detained transgender asylum seekers using the legal consciousness framework. The two aims of the project are (1) to describe their perspectives on the impact of detention on their health and wellbeing and how those experiences intersect with their gender and race identities and (2) to highlight forms of resilience and resistance to structural violence and marginalization.

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ISABEL GARCÍA VALDIVIA (Fall 2019)
Department:  Sociology

Project Title:  Unequal Aging: The Effects of Legal Status Trajectories on Older Mexican Immigrants’ Strategies in Later Life

Immigration scholars have long demonstrated that immigration status affects people of all ages in all aspects of their lives. Based on semi-structured interviews and an analysis of legal and social policies, this dissertation explores the effects of immigration status for Mexican older adult immigrants (50 years old and older) in the U.S. and return migrants to Mexico. I add to this literature by examining the factors that facilitate or hinder how older immigrants access economic, family, and medical and psychological support and the strategies they deploy as they age. This study investigates how these differ across countries, by gender, and by immigration status. This study identifies strategies older Mexican-origin immigrants deploy in older adulthood and how their strategies are enhanced or limited by location (e.g., state and local communities), familial relations, economic background, and by the broader legal context.

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DONNA HONARPISHEH (Spring 2020)
Department:  Comparative Literature

Project Title:  Possession as Form: The Modernist Temporality of Zar in 20th Century Iran

My research traces aesthetic representations of zār (the Afro-Iranian ritual and spirit possession that has its roots in East Africa) in modernist Iranian film and fiction. While Iran’s history of slavery and contemporary race relations is elided from national narratives, 20th century aesthetic production from the south of Iran (the Persian Gulf region) reflects zār as a mythic, spiritual, and elemental force that links Iran to East Africa, and foregrounds the lived experiences of Black Iranians. In supplementing my literary readings with semi-ethnographic findings, I will deepen the frame of reference on this ritual and the Afro-Iranian community in Iran beyond aesthetic representations.

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GABRIEL LESSER (Spring 2020)
Department:  Spanish and Portuguese

Project Title:  Caricaturing the Nation: Race, Gender, Social Sciences, and Nation Building in Nineteenth-century Mexico and Brazil

Why do caricatures appear in 19th century scientific publications on race and gender? Why did social scientists write comical texts to share their findings? My research focuses on a genre of often-humorous newspaper chronicles, called costumbrista sketches, that describe the unique habits and features of the rural and urban poor in each country by categorizing them into “types.” The authors of these racially charged and highly gendered satirical sketches viewed themselves as pioneers in the emerging field of social sciences. I hope to show that caricatures and jokes about race and gender were thus more than silly banter, functioning as part of a broader elite project to educate the countries’ populations on emerging scientific discourses. My project will analyze the relationship between humor, caricatures, social sciences, and nation building in 19th century Brazil and Mexico.

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MELISSA MCCALL (Spring 2020)
Department:  Jurisprudence and Social Policy

Project Title: Nurture or Neglect: Race, Gender, and the Social Psychology of Misogyny

Laws that govern child neglect rely on subjective judgments about risk to a child. Where laws are ambiguous, people may be influenced by culturally embedded stereotypes about a parent’s intersecting social identities. For Black mothers who work outside the home, these stereotypes create a double bind, because Black mothers are simultaneously expected to work and care for their children. Using an experimental design, I examine how lay decision makers assess risk to an unattended child differently, based on a parent’s race and gender, and decide whether or not to report the parent to Child Protective Services or to the police. This study should shed light on a psychological mechanism that helps to explain why Black families are more likely to be reported for abuse and neglect than White families, why their cases are more likely to be investigated, and why Black children are more likely to be removed from the home. Using the same theoretical framework, a second study explores how perceptions of essential workers’ identities in the COVID-19 pandemic affect the assessment of risk to workers’ families, and support for policies that would guarantee affordable childcare for parents who must continue to go to work while schools are closed.

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NALLELY MEJIA (Fall 2019)
Department:  Sociology

Project Title:  The Social and Cultural Tensions in Mexican Immigrant Families’ Acquisition, Use, and Understandings of Wealth and Household Finances

Although Latinos are the largest racial minority group in the United States, Latino families account for only 8 percent of wealth (Macias 2018). Wealth serves as a source of household stability, status, children’s well-being, personal fulfillment and more (Sherraden 1991). In Latino families, changes in wealth may be tied to familial and cultural obligations (Vallejo 2012). Therefore, wealth may also matter for reasons beyond those that are financial in nature; wealth and finances can carry cultural, social, and emotional meanings and expectations (Zelizer 1997). However, this particular framework has not yet been applied to Latinos, specifically Mexican immigrant families. This work brings together the literature on wealth inequality, economic incorporation, and immigration. Using a generational comparison, I will examine how Mexican immigrants and their adult children understand and navigate household finances and wealth in San Joaquin County. Drawing on in-depth interviews with parent-adult child pairs, I will argue that Mexican immigrants and their families face unique social and cultural tensions, related to immigrant generation, in their acquisition, use, and maintenance of finances and wealth in the U.S and abroad.

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DAVID PHILOXENE (Spring 2020)
Department:  Education - Social Cultural Studies

Project Titile:  A Geography of Violence and Safety: Black Youth, Spatial & Racial Logics

My dissertation project is a critical geography interrogating the intersections of violence, race, and spatiality in Oakland, California. In particular, I hope to complicate understandings of how Black youth experience violence, and in the process, highlight the sense-making ‘cartographies’ they deploy when navigating material, symbolic, and social geographies. While urban violence has been heavily studied, it has largely been through the purview of interpersonal violence. This conceptualization of violence, while critically important, lacks the theoretical depth to capture the varied ways quotidian violence often structures Black life in the inner city, including young people’s social ecological realities across neighborhoods and schools.

This study then attempts to highlight the void in traditional conversations about “urban violence” by inserting Black youths’ qualitative experiences within them, and in the process, amplify questions of sense- and space-making. Methodologically, cartography offers a window into how Black youth physically navigate space, but more significantly, the attendant perceptions and meanings they have regarding ‘place,’ including how race and violence operate socio-spatially. In a rapidly gentrifying landscape these situated knowledges take on added significance. Insomuch, the project signals the worlds of Black youth as spaces to deepen theorization about racialized violence and anti-Blackness, yet the possibility for counter-mapping, spatial transgression, and points of departure for Black futurity. These are the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of Black youth space in Oakland.

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MELANIE PLASENCIA (Fall 2019)
Department, Ethnic Studies. Latina/o/x Studies

Project Title:  How Older Latinas Collectively Care for “Chosen Family”

Broadly, my research provides one of the first studies completed on older Latina/o’s in the United States by examining how they negotiate the challenges of aging in the context of extreme poverty, deteriorating health, and diminishing government support. In this project, funded by the CRG, I utilize the work of queer and feminist scholars, such as Kath Weston’s seminal work, Families We Choose, to highlight how older Latina’s select friends as familia elegida/“chosen family” to carry out daily tasks, provide social and emotional support, and make important life decisions. As a grant recipient, I plan to revisit my fieldsite, a pan-ethnic Latinx community, in order to unravel more instances in which friends provide older Latina’s with vital information, resources, and support.

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OMI SALAS-SANTACRUZ (Fall 2019)
Department: Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender in Education

Project Title:  Learning to Be: A Critical Phenomenology of Institutional Transphobia as Recounted by Trans Latinx Students Navigating College Life

This dissertation is a case study on the “cultural ideological system of oppression” (Leonardo & Broderick, 2011) that makes trans violence possible in institutions of higher education, and how trans Latinx students imagine a new university amid this violence. Embedded in what Lather (2014) describes as “post-qualitative research grounded in the immanence of doing,” I ask, what do trans Latinx students’ embodied knowledge of college life tell us about how transphobia functions on the college campus? That is, I uncover the embodied (Cruz, 2001) and affective dimensions of knowledge through students’ accounts of learning self-discipline and governance (Foucault,1970; Critchley, 2010) that is necessary to be a college student of a given university. Using critical phenomenology as a method that situates individual consciousness in material, historical, and social contexts (Guenther, 2018), I draw from students’ accounts of tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1960) as a window into “the organization of academic culture” (Dill, 2012). I then use this knowledge as an indication of the implicit values, beliefs, and ideologies of the institution. In this manner, I rely on theories on the management of academic culture (Clark,1983; Becher, 1989; Dill, 2012) and the process of acquiring embodied knowledge within organizations (Strati, 1999), to make intelligible the organizational cultural processes that instrumentalize trans violence (Salamon, 2018), and how students negotiate the complex and multilayered processes of accommodation and resistance rooted in this violence.

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ALICIA SHEARES (Fall 2019)
Department:  Sociology

Project Title:  Navigating Inequality: Black Tech Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and Atlanta

This dissertation explores the experiences of Black technology founders in Silicon Valley and Atlanta. Geography matters because it effects access to institutional and organizational resources, and social networks. Silicon Valley receives the largest proportion of all venture capital dollars but the region struggles with racial diversity, as Blacks make up just six percent of the population. Conversely, Atlanta receives much fewer venture capital dollars and is a majority Black city. I hypothesize that differences will arise between how Black tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Atlanta network, fundraise, and navigate entrepreneurship. To answer my research question, I will interview Black tech entrepreneurs and investors, gather media archival data, and conduct participant observation at tech meetups and pitch competitions to get a holistic understanding of tech entrepreneurial spaces. My research has important implications. The racial disparities that exist in tech mean that some racial groups have access to shape the future of political, cultural, social, and economic life, while other underrepresented racial groups are excluded altogether. Understanding how Blacks navigate through racial barriers, particularly in the technology space, will shed light on the mechanisms that can facilitate a more equitable future

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SURILI SHETH (Fall 2019)
Department:  Political Science

Project Title:  Sexual Assault and Intersectional Women’s Gender Consciousness

How can we conceptualize and measure women’s (politicized) gender consciousness quantitatively while taking intersecting identities, particularly race, into account? How do discussions around sexual assault effect this politicized gender consciousness for different groups of women and men? Does women’s gender consciousness, and the effect that discussions around sexual assault as a topic have on it, differ in different political milieus in the United States – for example, during the women’s march or during the next presidential election? In this project, I examine previous scholarship on consciousness and social identity, summarize results from a pilot experiment, and lay out an extended experiment based on these results. I intend to (1) improve the conceptualization and quantitative measurement of intersectional women’s gender consciousness, (2) estimate whether and how much discussions around sexual assault are affecting consciousness women of different parties and identities, (3) understand if there are simultaneous effects on other aspects of political attitudes and behavior – turnout, vote choice, trust, interest, and social movement participation.

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DAVID TURNER III (Spring 2020)
Department:  Social and Cultural Studies in Education/Critical Studies in Race, Class, and Gender

Project Title:  Free Our Dreams: A Comparative Analysis of Political Meaning-Making in Black Male Youth Activists in Los Angeles

This dissertation focuses on Black male youth activism and political engagement. More specifically, this study focuses on the experience of Black male youth in community based programs that engage in racial justice-based activism and community organizing. Drawing upon 60 interviews from 30 Black male youth activists in two community based organizations in Los Angeles, this study elevates the political imaginaries that Black male youth adopt based on their political activism and how they were educated in community based organizations. Focusing on two groups – Black male youth who are politicized amongst other Black male youth, and Black male youth who are politicized amongst young people of color across race and genders, this study asserts that Black boys and young men engage in Black Transformative Agency. I define Black transformative agency as a dialectical process where Black youth make sense of, and work to transform, social institutions and their relationships to communities of color. How Black students theorize their agency, however, varies depending on how they were politicized and what forms of activism they engage in, which is deeply influenced by their understanding of gender, geography, class, and comparative race relations.

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ALTHEA WASOW (Spring 2020)
Department:  Film & Media

Project Title:  "Cops" 1897

My dissertation, “Criminality, Capitalism, Critique: Silent Film and Its Afterlives,” examines silent film through the prisms of criminality and capitalism, analyzing the ways in which the emerging institutions of modern policing and motion-pictures corroborated and subverted one another’s projects from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. I focus on silent films that register the imbrication of the police and moving-pictures as they were consolidated into dominant social institutions with increasingly standardized practices. “’Cops’ 1897,” the first chapter, traces continuities and ruptures between early silent films that focus on the policing of Asian and Asian American communities and other “reality” moving-image media that engage policing and racial difference, including “Cops,” the long-running television program.