2024 - 2025 CRG Student Research Grantees

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.

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?