2022 - 2023 CRG Student Research Grantees

JOSHUA G. ACOSTA  (Spring 2023)
Department:  Ethnic Studies

Project Title:  Exhibiting Abjection: American Humanitarianism, White Love, Disability, and Filipino Leprous Children

In December of 1927, a group of Filipina children found themselves in a luxury department store in Philadelphia. As part of an event hosted by the Leonard Wood Memorial for the Eradication of Leprosy, an American-run charity, the children were staged in an exhibit to raise money for patients at the Culion Island clinic, the site of the world’s largest leprosy sanitarium, in the western Philippines. In this project, I examine how race, gender, and disability intersect through the display of Filipina children in reproducing notions of infantilism, domesticity, femininity, and dependency in American philanthropy and cultural projects of overseas imperialism. Central to these efforts was the circulation of the abject and disease-ridden Filipino leprous child which became a forceful emblem to recast the image of Philippine dependence. Moreover, this project explores the cultural life of humanitarianism and transpacific empire-building by centering how racialized and gendered images of colonial disability in the Philippines shaped the tenor of American international altruism in the early 20th century.

TANYA BERTONE & JUSTIN LIMOGES  (Spring 2023)
Department:  Archaeology, Anthropology

Project Title: Community Accountable Archaeology Project: UCB/White Mountain Apache Collaboration on a Cultural Heritage Resources

This project emerged out of a seminar focused on 1) critically analyzing past archaeological work in relation to Native American communities and 2) identifying emerging best practices in the field, with an emphasis on ethical and sustainable modes of interaction between archaeological researchers and the communities in which they are operating (Atalay 2012,2016; Tuhiwai Smith 2012; Lightfoot and Lopez 2013). The goal of our collaborative project was to work with the WMA Tribal Heritage Preservation Officer to produce a tangible “pocket sized” zine that includes an adapted version of the current White Mountain Apache Cultural Heritage Resources Best Management Practices guide, along with additional community resources. As we move further into the digital age it is important to acknowledge that access to technological resources are not evenly distributed, and are often in especially short supply within Native communities. There is something to be said for the physicality and permanence of a book or magazine, which can spark a memory or reward curiosity, and we believe that providing culturally relevant information in an accessible format is a vital way to ensure that archaeological work occurs in collaborative dialogue with, rather than at the extractive expense of, Native communities. In working with the WMA community, our focus has been on a creative collaboration aimed at realizing a tribe-identified goal that would have otherwise been hampered by resource constraints.

ANDRES CAICEDO  (Spring 2023)
Department:  Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Project Title:  Caring for Palm Trees: The Gendered Politics of Plant Reproduction and Assisted Pollination in Colombian Oil Palm Plantations

The plant disease Bud Rot is my ethnographic entry point to examining the gendered labor regimes, plant reproduction strategies, and scientific interventions that sustain three Colombian major oil palm plantations: Tumaco, Puerto Wilches, and Magdalena. Bud rot rose to global notoriety as the main threat to palm monoculture in Latin America, especially in Colombia, where the disease led to the near-total destruction of plantations by the beginning of the 21st century. In response, Colombian scientists designed a new palm tree resistant to bud rot but that, as an infertile species, depends on the human labor practice of assisted pollination. Companies claim they prefer to hire “women” and “single mothers” as pollinators, arguing their hand skills, values, and social conditions fit assisted pollination’s goals: fixing plant infertility, saving the agro-industry, and promoting gender equity. I investigate how these gendered narratives about reproduction, care, infertility, and dexterity emerge across Colombian plantations. Over 18 months of fieldwork, I will interact with plantation scientists, managers, and pollinators to understand how they perceive and experience assisted pollination. My research unifies science studies and environmental and feminist anthropology to interrogate how gendered politics of plant reproduction sustain plantations amid international concerns about unruly pathogens in agrobusiness.

ATAYA CESSPOOCH (Fall 2022)
Department:  Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Project Title:  Making Power: Indigenous Sovereignty, Oil and Gas Development and Environmental Justice on the Ute Reservation

There has been a recent profusion of scholarship situating oil and gas development/extraction (ODG) as an environmental justice issue impeding Indigenous sovereignty. Yet, multiple tribal nations rely on OGD for revenue and their perspectives remain largely unexamined in the literature. The Ute Tribe has been leasing land on their 1.2-million-acre Reservation in northeastern Utah since 1971 and this revenue has lifted the Tribe out of poverty. However, the permitting process for a well on the Reservation involves a tangled web of environmental approvals from four federal agencies whose decision-making processes often do not include the Tribe. This is in direct contradiction to the Tribe’s own jurisdiction, making “ the environment” a contested space and its protection deeply political. Exacerbating these tensions, air quality on the Reservation has reached unhealthy levels with 90 percent of emissions coming from OGD. This project draws on critical Indigenous studies and political ecology to examine the complex and contradictory relationships between OGD, Indigenous sovereignty, and environmental justice on the Ute Reservation. I will engage in archival and ethnographic research to explore how Ute people rationalize OGD, and its concomitant environmental and public health issues, within Ute epistemologies.

AJ KURDI  (Fall 2022)
Department:  Comparative Ethnic Studies
Project Title:  The Multiscalars of Intersectionality: Ethnic Minority Queer Organizing in Comparative Perspective

My doctoral research aims to detangle conceptual and empirical puzzles pertaining to transnational social movements, equality policies and intersectionality. By conducting a comparative study on the self-organization of queer people belonging to racial and ethnic minorities in Hungary, Germany, Canada and the United States, I seek to demonstrate how different forms of ethnic minority queer organizing shape the priorities and political orientations of mainstream LGBTQI movements and public policies in Europe and North America.

LUIZA BASTOS LAGES  (Fall 2022)
Department:  Comparative Ethnic Studies

Project Title:  Interview with Brazilian Artist Luana Vitra

With the support of the CRG Student Grants Program, I will conduct an in person, filmed interview with the Brazilian artist Luana Vitra, focusing on her art practice as well as her art installation "Zanzado em Trama é Armação de Arapuca", exhibited at the FRESTAS Trienal de Arte, SESC- Sorocaba, Brazil. This interview is a crucial component of my current doctoral research which centers the contemporary art practices of Indigenous, Black, and mestiza artists from Latin America, and their diaspora in North America, with a focus on how particular aesthetic practices interrogate and resist the coloniality of gender and its intrinsic hierarchies of racial categorization. I am eager to consider how these practices may constitute an insurgence-resurgence of non-modern (non-Western-colonial) knowledges, reconceptualize the human as delinked from the imposed modern colonial episteme, and elicit a sensory-erotics of affinity carved out of—and in spite of—difference. By extension, I also intend to explore how specific art practices may open possibilities for a reconception of aesthetics, one detached from Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy, which has decisively served to regiment hierarchies of the human, determining who gets to be a subject of rights in a liberal state. Ultimately, I will inquire how these art practices might repair the modern separation of knowing, sensing, and being to amplify what art can be, do, and become.

JAYE MEJIA-DUWAN  (Fall 2022)
Department:  Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Project Title: A Comparative Ethnographic Study of Strategies of Resistance Employed by QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Color) Agricultural Collectives

Myriad groups have been excluded from studies of the environment and agriculture. Recent research analyzes the unique relationships of people of color to environmental topics. In addition, nascent research has investigated queer communities in relation to environmental studies. Yet very little work has brought these two analytical perspectives into conversation with one another. My work pairs scholarship on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color food sovereignty and community resistance with scholarship on queer agricultural communities to explore the particular relations of QTPOC to land and agriculture as well as their unique strategies for advancing political inclusion and social equity. My work highlights the intersectional forms of discrimination that QTPOC face in relation to agriculture, food security, and food sovereignty. Simultaneously, I investigate unique strategies of QTPOC resistance while creating reciprocal and collaborative relationships with community members. Of particular interest are the role of disability in mediating agricultural relationships; coalitional possibilities between Black, Indigenous, and Latinx queer agriculturalists; mutual aid and anti-capitalist organizing; diasporic spices and traditional medicines; and the role of agricultural collectives in helping marginalized communities adapt to climate change.

MARTHA ORTEGA MENDOZA  (Fall 2022)
Department:  Graduate School of Education

Project Title:  The Testimonios of UndocuGrads: Undocumented Latinx/a/o Doctoral Students attending the University of California (UC) system

Martha's dissertation seeks to document and uplift undocumented graduate students’ voices and experiences as they navigate professional and academic degree doctoral programs. The research questions guiding her dissertation are as follows: What factors, if any, influence the educational experiences of undocumented Latinx/a/o doctoral students at the University of California? And what are the support mechanisms that undocumented Latinx/a/o doctoral students draw upon to navigate their respective doctoral programs? To begin answering these questions, Martha's dissertation will conduct online individual testimonial interviews with either current or recent Latinx/a/o doctoral graduates who completed their degrees from one of the UC campuses.

DAVID PHAM  (Spring 2023)
Department:  Ethnic Studies

Project Title:  Sensing Relation: The Care Work of Cetacean Necropsy in the Learning Endings Project

Learning Endings is an interdisciplinary research project led by artist Patty Chang, veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, and feminist cultural theorist and ecofeminist writer Astrida Neimanis. Their collaborative research uses scientific, artistic, and humanistic perspectives to study cetacean death as an entry point to foregrounding and understanding the various social, political, and ecological crises, or endings, in which the world is mired. In studying the death of marine mammals, the researchers are invested in locating the possibility of multispecies care through the scientific practice of necropsy. Support from the CRG will allow me to travel to Purchase, New York to attend an immersive, participatory performance and talk by Chang, Neimanis, and Neimanis at the Neuberger Museum that draws upon their research findings from Learning Endings. The participatory performance will invite audience members to participate in a memory game based on Learning Endings' “Touch Ritual Archive”—a series of images that document the tender relation between the scientist and the mammal and the care work the scientist performs post-mortem. This research grant will assist me in developing Chapter Four of my dissertation, tentatively titled “Theorizing the Liquid Cosmos: Oceanic Life and Interspecies Relation in the Works of Patty Chang and Wu Tsang.”

JENNY PHAM  (Spring 2023)
Department:  History

Project Title:  Sex in the City: Intimate Relations between Sex Workers, the Military, and Local Governments

My proposed project explores the intertwined relationship between three key actors – sex workers, military personnel (American and Vietnamese), and local government – that contributed to the expansion of the sex industry in the RVN from 1954-1975. Why and how do subeconomies reliant on sexual labor proliferate near military bases? To what extent were gender relations influenced and shaped by race and class? To investigate the social and cultural history from the perspective of sex workers, I ask what was the nature of social relations between South Vietnamese sex workers, their clients (white and Black American soldiers versus Vietnamese soldiers or locals of different economic classes), provincial governments, and the state (South Vietnam and America)? To what extent did the concentrated influx of American military personnel influence South Vietnamese provincial government and society and vice versa? By exploring these questions, I hope to broaden our understanding of how race and class influenced gender relations and government policies in South Vietnam from 1954-1975. Using archival materials, my project expands existing knowledge in the fields of Vietnamese studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies by highlighting the experiences of South Vietnamese sex workers, a historically marginalized population.

TIARE RIBEAUX  (Spring 2023)
Department:  Art Practice 

Project Title:  Ke Aka (The Reflection)

Māhū is a gender identity that is currently being reclaimed by Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) as a Hawaiian cultural identity/role as was practiced by our ancestors pre-contact. To be māhū is to move between the spectrum of male and female but prescribe to neither, and is often associated with balancing of energies and healing, and is a spiritual role. The experience of being māhū is often not fully understood even within Hawaiian communities, let alone the rest of the world. I am currently writing a feature film screenplay “Ke Aka (The Reflection)” that centers intergenerational and multi-dimensional Māhū characters - as a story it aims to give a voice to us and show the many aspects of our cultural identity.  My hope is that with this grant, I can continue to research māhū as a role/gender identity through these focus areas/questions: how our ancestors lived and worked in this role, the ways in which settler-colonialism had suppressed this role, the ways it persisted, and the ways it is being reclaimed through different practitioners in Hawai‘i. Through reading books and articles, watching media, speaking with mentors, and writing about my own lived experience, I plan to incorporate this research into my screenplay and larger body of work.

NATASHA SHANNON  (Spring 2023)
Department:  Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Project Title:  Advancing Appalachia: A Comparative Analysis of Agrifood Tech and Regenerative Agriculture Rural Development Strategies in Central Appalachia

My research examines the role of agrarian rural development strategies in supporting just economic and ecological transitions in Central Appalachia. Agrarian rural development in Central Appalachia currently takes two broad approaches: large-scale, capital-intensive, technology-oriented agrifood tech initiatives and small-scale, low-input, community-oriented regenerative agriculture initiatives. Both agrarian development visions aim to create jobs, confront climate change, revitalize regional ecologies, and empower marginalized communities. Similar challenges face agrifood tech and regenerative agriculture programs, including entrenched extractive agricultural models, historical and structural barriers to rural development in Appalachia, regional stigmas and marginalization, and agrarian legacies of racialized and gendered dispossession. It is in this context that I seek to understand why and how rural development is taking an agrarian turn in Central Appalachia, and with what consequences for the communities involved. I draw on qualitative mixed methods for this work, including participant observation; in-depth, semi-structured interviews; archival and demographic research; and content and discourse analysis.

AMBER SWEAT  (Fall 2022)
Department:  French

Project Title:  "Banlieues Bleues": Girl/womanhood, "néo-négritude", and the peripheral communion

My research project, with travel support from the Berkeley Center for Race and Gender, will consider the Paris metropolitan's “Banlieues bleues’’ festival as an afterlife of the négritude movement’s Black arts festival, which first took place in Dakar 1966. While the festival does not officially champion any racio-ethnic specificity, I conceptualize it as a site of Black gathering that has recently taken on both youthed and feminized dimensions in tandem with Blackness; essentially, its novel programming structure and iconography centralize Black womanhood, girlhood, and afroféminisme, that which have largely been exempt from conversations on Paris’ periphery due to the banlieue’s historically adulti-fied and masculinized imaginary. I will be evaluating the ways in which Black women and girls cultivate allegiances between themselves, other girls and women of the Black francophone diaspora, and broader transatlantic networks. Going a bit deeper, I am particularly interested in how this festival will forge networks between Black girls and women in a peri/‘post’-COVID world. How can Black girls and women sing together— how can we melodically breathe together —in an era where the dissemination of contaminated breath has destabilized and restructured our methods of communion?

TIFFANY TAYLOR (Fall 2022)
Department:  Anthropology

Project Title: Additional Support Necessary to Overcome Programmatic Barriers to Return to Work and Rehabilitation

This research project seeks to understand the diverse perspectives, opinions, and lived experiences of individuals participating in the Ticket to Work (TTW) program. Emphasis is placed on gaining more information, via in-depth interviews, on the resources and support necessary to overcome systematic barriers to rehabilitation and employment. Many studies have highlighted the systemic and programmatic barriers to employment among SSDI and SSI beneficiaries participating in work incentive programs. However, limited studies have focused on illuminating the experiences of diverse individuals’ and perspectives on the resources necessary to overcome these hindrances.

IDA WILSON (Spring 2023)
Department:  School of Public Health

Project Title:  It Affects Us Too: The Public Health Effects of Police Violence Impacting Black and Latina Women

Encounters with the police are a leading cause of morbidity, mortality, as well as a myriad of other poor health outcomes for people of color in the United States. There have been many documented deaths of Black and Latina women at the hands of the police, and in addition to fatal encounters, these women have experienced other forms of police violence, including excessive use of force while pregnant, and sexual violence. Despite these issues, the discourse of police violence has mostly been examined in the context of Black men’s adverse encounters with the police, ultimately overshadowing the experiences of women of color. Due to this issue, little research has focused on the experiences of women of color and the extent to which the police and police violence have an impact on their health and well-being. To address this gap, my research will examine: (1) the ways in which Black and Latina women encounter police and police violence; (2) the ways in which they define police violence and how they perceive it to uniquely impact them and (3) the extent to which these encounters impact their health and well-being.

MICHAEL ALLEN WRIGHT (Spring 2023)
Department:  Sociology

Project Title:  The Demise of Urban Renewal and the Invention of Land Banking

This dissertation is a historical case study of the emergence of private-public partnerships for urban redevelopment, with a focus on urban renewal and land banking. By process tracing the case of urban redevelopment in Detroit from 1950 to 2020, I argue that the emergence of land banking is linked to the demise of urban renewal. I track the key moments of this gradual transformation of legal institutions and organizational forms across the local field of urban redevelopment in Detroit and the US national juridical field. The project has broad theoretical implications for sociological field theory, and contributes substantively to the sociology of law, organizations, law and society, urban sociology, urban planning and racial inequality.