2020 - 2021 CRG Student Research Grantees

MITZIA MARTINEZ CASTELLANOS (Spring 2021)
Department: Jurisprudence and Social Policy 

Project Title:  From Illegalized to Legalized: A Study on Immigrants that Undergo Legalization

This study explores the transition that illegalized immigrants — immigrants made illegal and deportable by immigration law — undergo when they become holders of a lawful immigration status. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with formerly undocumented young adults who have benefited from a legal immigration remedy that guarantees the attainment of a green card and/or U.S. citizenship; and undocumented young people that have not adjusted their status or may not be eligible for a legal immigration remedy. This study aims to uncover what may be the unforeseen consequences for immigrants, their self-concept and their sense of community when they become green card holders and U.S. citizens. I aim to examine what is overlooked when legalization is framed as the ultimate goal of the immigrant justice movement. It will record whether something is lost and/or whether something is exchanged through legalization. The experiences of legalized immigrants may emphasize that when advocacy is focused solely on legal solutions (e.g. amnesty), the social movement may be limited from understanding how law shapes the innate identities, the legal consciousness, and the relationship of legalized immigrants to the undocumented community.

AYA FABROS (Spring 2021)
Department: Sociology 

Project Title:  Institutionalized Precarity: States, Philippine Migrants and the Making of Global Worker Families, 1974-2020

How are migrant women and men maintained as precarious, essential workers for generations, why does intergenerational precarity persist amidst the expansion of origin-state protection, and with what consequences for the social reproduction of migrant worker families? My project traces the state-institutionalized trajectories of Barrio Mundo (BM) and Barrio Vaticano (BV) since the 1974 New Labor Code—the Philippine law often cited for producing “the most globalized labor force on the planet” (Rodriguez 2010) and the migration governance model currently replicated throughout the Global South. For nearly half a century, generations of Barrio Mundo women and men have been moving from one short-term contract to the next across multiple countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, South Korea and Israel. Coursing through the state labor-brokerage infrastructure, BMs itinerant contractors maintain split-households in order to support a lifelong pattern of multinational, serial labor migration. Relying on family sponsorship and social networks, Barrio Vaticano migrants stay in one country and occupation for generations as domesticated wage-workers. Cultivated to subsist on domestic-work by state laws and church community networks since the 1970s, Barrio Vaticano women and men forge reunified households to survive as low-wage freelancers in Italy. With a rare longue-durée analysis of Philippine labor-export and its village implementation, my dissertation illustrates the institutional reproduction and intersectional effects of global precarity on longstanding overseas worker families.

JESSIE GARCIA GUTIERREZ (Spring 2021)
Department:  Public Health & Social Welfare 

Project Title:  Accessing the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Mental Health of Transgender and Non-Binary People of Color

Most of the research on health disparities in the transgender and gender non-binary (TGNB) community encompass outcomes of mental health. These pre-pandemic studies have found that there are high rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and self-injury within the TGNB community. The research also finds that the community has distinct healthcare needs from that of the general population. Some TGNB individuals choose to utilize hormonal treatment and/or undergo gender-affirming surgery/surgeries to address their gender dysphoria and feel more attuned to their gender identity. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about many social changes and regulations (stay-at-home orders, social distancing, stress on the healthcare system, unemployment levels, etc.) that have had some consequential effects on TGNB individuals. Yet, there are limited scholarly articles that focus on the virus as it relates to the mental health effects of TGNB individuals in the U.S.  

The objective of this qualitative study is to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the mental health of TGNB people of color – an understudied and underrepresented community before the pandemic. The proposed research aims to examine the prevalent reasons related to changes in the mental health of TGNB people of color during the pandemic.

SARA KNUTSON (Spring 2021)
Department:  Anthropology 

Project Title:  Arabs and Slavs in the Global North: Perspectives on Race and Slavery in the Medieval Past

Scholarship on medieval slave trades, systems that connected communities across Eurasia, has long remained silent on important issues of race and its intersections with practices of slavery, colonization, and imperialism. My project intends to address this gap by examining the relationship between racialized practices and slavery from the perspectives of the Slavs and Arabs, past individuals whose histories remain intertwined in the material evidence of Arabic dirhams, coinage that flowed from the Arab World into wider Eurasia (c. 700-1100 CE). I examine the presence of Arabic coins in Eurasia as proxies for an interconnected system of captive-taking and enslavement that partly fueled the ancient global economy. I argue that the trafficking of humans into wider, trans-Eurasian slave trades was fundamentally connected to practices that became the predecessors to early modern forms of racialization. This historical case study has the potential to illuminate our understandings of diverse human experiences in the medieval past, to further clarify how perceived human differences have shifted across time and space, and to complicate ongoing debates on race and racialized practices within the wider humanities and social sciences.

AHN LEE (Spring 2021)
Department:  Art Practice 

Project:  The Platform Silkworm Project

 The Platform Silkworm Project is an extension of Ahn Lee’s research and art practice. Lee is a nonbinary, queer Cantonese MFA student who researches silkworms and their connectivity, directly and metaphorically, to the Cantonese diaspora. Funding from CRG will build capacity for Lee’s thesis exhibition at Berkeley Art Museum in Spring 2022; research for the exhibition will take place during their residency at Platform Artspace, a public art venue adjacent to Wurster Hall. Here, Lee will raise silkworms while facilitating open studio days and engaging in public discussions with UC Berkeley community. Lee’s project historicizes silkworms in the Bay Area, focusing on the Piedmont Silk Experiment and Wakamatsu Silkworm Farm. Lee approaches silkworm cultivation (historically documented across the globe as “women’s work”) as an embodied research-creation process exposing a history intertwined with racism and sexism. Lee brings a critical race and gender framework to the community conversations she plans to hold, which will share the East/Southeast Asian ancestral practice of raising silkworms with the UC Berkeley community. This project has an undeniable urgency at a critical moment: we return to campus during a global pandemic while violence against Asians continues to rage in the Bay Area.

MEGHNA MUKHERJEE (Spring 2021)
Department:  Sociology 

Project Title:  Immaculate Re-Conception: Redefining Health and Reproductive Risk Using Prenatal Genetic Testing

Since its inception in the 1970s, prenatal genetic technology has been reshaping reproductive decision-making and health in the United States. However, the field remains loosely regulated, and providers and patients are ill-equipped and uncertain about how best to use prenatal genetic testing for reproductive decisions. Additionally, professional training and policies do not yet engage diversifying patient populations who have varying family desires. These gaps have implications for the future of reproductive and disability justice.

Accordingly, this dissertation asks how patients and providers (reproductive physicians and genetic counselors) involved in prenatal genetic testing are negotiating genetic knowledge, framing diagnoses, and contending with tensions about health identities. Further, I question how these negotiations are patterned unequally and how this affects varied patient populations. Using mixed qualitative methods, I harness provider and patient-centered experiences and perspectives to (i) unravel the co-production of socio-medical knowledge, (ii) inform policy interventions, and (iii) develop a reproductive justice-grounded theory about the reconceptualization of health and bio-citizenship. As individuals navigate prenatal genetic testing, their decision-making calls into question definitions of healthiness, ability, and existence. By illuminating how health is reconceived in the era of routinized technology, this research will advance protections for diverse families and solutions for critical reproductive and disability issues.

JESUS NAZARIO (Fall 2020)
Department:  Ethnic Studies 

Project Title:  From the Alto Balsas to the Long Point: Diasporic Nahua Political Formations Beyond Mexican-U.S. Borders

What relationalities are possible through Indigenous political mobilization in the Diaspora? The Nahuas from The Land of Fresh Water hold answers through their independence movement that began in 2016. My question is bounded in two interconnected places, the diasporic Nahua community in Houston, Texas and their originating Nahua town of The Land of Fresh Water in Guerrero, Mexico. After 300 years, people from The Land are seeking independence by breaking a communal land grant with another Nahua town to become a town with equal access to land, political representation, and cultural patrimony. However, Nahua elders and youth have varying goals for achieving political sovereignty and different modes of organizing for such goals.

Through a pilot research project, to be conducted in summer 2021, I seek to situate and analyze the state of their independence movement almost 5 years later. I seek to do so by interviewing the Fellowship Committee, the 7-member team that has led the movement to help The Land become a sovereign town. This current movement sheds light on contemporary Indigenous sovereignty movements happening in the Global South and offers methods and answers for how social media has enabled, and politically linked, social relations centered on Indigenous sovereignty.

LESDI GOUSSEN ROBLETO (Spring 2021)
Department:  Art History 

Project Title:  (Un)Mending Bodies: Patricia Belli and Feminist Artistic Praxis in Central America, 1986-2000s

“(Un)Mending Bodies” focuses on the work of the contemporary Nicaraguan artist, Patricia Belli (b. 1964), whose textile and mixed-media assemblages from the late 1980s through the early 2000s evidence themes related to gender, sexuality, and unruly bodies, during a critical time of transition in Nicaraguan social and political life. Looking closely at Belli’s practice, my project considers how her work— which constitutes an expansive and rich archive of textures, materialities, and somatic languages— foregrounds a feminist sensibility that reworks the legacy of national aesthetics and socio-political discourses in the country. Following Belli’s oeuvre, I center on the condition and possibilities of gendered matter and her unrelenting desire to craft new bodies. Thinking of bod(ies) in an expanded field—as corporal, social, political, and geographic containers—I consider how Belli’s practice gives contours to the ways bodies are made and unmade during times of political crisis, and how the notion of mending, as a craft-based technique and feminist strategy, is deployed to unravel patriarchal discourses that condition bodies into closed forms. Through her textural interventions, Belli’s works also allow us to explore a repertoire of feminist artistic praxis from this period, both in Nicaragua and across Central America, that come to create networks of resistance and exchange. My dissertation ultimately serves to demonstrate how these interventions serve as the foundation on which regional intersectional feminisms begin to take shape within contemporary art in Central America.

ELISA RUSSIAN (Fall 2020)
Department:  Italian Studies 

Project Title:  Autoethnography Visualized: The Case of Kym Ragusa

 In her writing and filmmaking, Kym Ragusa (1966) engages with methodologies from anthropology, ethnography, and oral history in order to investigate her mixed-race roots. The daughter of an African-American mother and an Italian-American father, Ragusa casts herself as both the author and object of her field research, whose aim is to critique the discriminatory practices exercised within and beyond her home. In works such asFuori/Outside(1997) andThe Skin between Us(2006), Ragusa calls into question the usefulness of ethnic categories and normative approaches to identity, and illustrates how the relationality of social contexts shapes the formation of individuals. Focusing in particular on representations of visibility and belonging, my project analyzes the thematic and formal relationships that resonate across Ragusa’s experimental documentaries and autoethnographic narratives. I explore how Ragusa’s accounts of the racial and economic inequalities she was confronted with in her youth serve not to narrate a sense of individual “exemplarity,” but to unravel the ideological mechanisms at play in social reproduction.

KAREN VILLEGAS (Fall 2020)
Department:  Education 

Project Title:  Languaging “to be” Neoliberal: Understanding the Ideological Practices of the Naturalization Process

 The hostile challenges facing immigration in the U.S today needs to be understood as an extension of a much more complex racialized relationship dating back to the formation of the U.S. state through settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and neoliberalism in this historical specific moment, all of which work together to define institutionalized forms of belonging. The material effects of settler colonialism weave together economic and language ideologies to train immigrants to be literate in neoliberal citizenship. The role of language and literacy is mutually constitutive of the nation building process: language comes to be ideologized and therefore embedded within national identity. The construction of the neoliberal citizen is often mediated through English as a Second Language (ESL) Naturalization courses. Through participant observation of an adult, ESL Naturalization course and subsequent interviews with its students and their extended families, this project explores how colonial language ideologies are indexed within the Naturalization process and matriculate into the creation of the neoliberal citizen.

CLAIRE WRIGLEY (Fall 2020)
Department:  History 

Project Title:  Family, Nation, Empire: An Imperial History of Public Housing in Britain, 1890-2017

 From the late nineteenth century until today, two of the most controversial issues in British political, social, and cultural life have been the questions of what the British family is, and how it can be improved. I argue that a profoundly racialized and gendered logic of imperialism shaped public housing policy from the earliest efforts at reform in the late nineteenth century, making it one of the most consequential sites of state intervention into private, family life. My dissertation traces how the state strove to redefine what a home was, what activities could take place there, and what relationships constituted a British family. Using Britain’s two largest and most diverse cities, London and Birmingham, as case studies, I show that the overarching goal of public housing policy was to limit the social reproduction of ‘unfit’ Britons and to promote instead the reproduction of socially acceptable, politically useful, and economically productive citizens who would uphold Britain’s status as an imperial power. In the process two of life’s most fundamental concepts—‘home’ and ‘family’—became racialized, and the home became a distinct but not necessarily bounded space; not just political, but politicized.

PENG YIN (Spring 2021)
Department:  Education 

Project Title:  The Racialization of International Student Mobility: Roots, Effects, and Implications for American Higher Education Institutions

My dissertation investigates how international student mobility (ISM) in the context of American higher education institutions (HEIs) has become increasingly subjected to an emergent paradigm of racialized otherness. To contextualize my inquiry on the paradigm of racialized otherness, I choose to focus on a specific and vibrant body of the international student population enrolled in American HEIs, i.e., undergraduate Chinese international students. As an illustrative case, examining the paradigm of racialized otherness vis-à-vis the undergraduate Chinese international students aims to offer a distinctive yet nonexclusive lens to probe into the racialization of ISM on a broader scale. My dissertation consists of three papers. Paper 1 adopts the method of critical discourse analysis to examine and identify the undergirding constituents of the paradigm of racialized otherness. Paper 2 draws on the framework of item response theory (IRT)-based modeling to construct and validate a measurement instrument that taps into the students’ perceptions of the undergirding constituents of the paradigm of racialized otherness. Paper 3 takes the approach of multi-sited ethnography to explore how to leverage the affordances of the students’ everyday learning and living experiences to tackle the paradigm of racialized otherness.