Fall 2025 CRG Student Research Grantees
ISABELLA BEROUTSOS (Fall 2025)
Department: History of Art
Project Title: "Patterns for the Desert": Dorothea Lange and the Women of Manzanar’s Camouflage Net Factory
From June to December 1942, in California’s remote Eastern Sierra, several hundred Japanese Americans weaved 40,000 military camouflage nets, carefully-designed geometric constructions of burlap and wire up to seventy feet wide. This endeavor took place at Manzanar, a War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp where 11,070 Japanese Americans were imprisoned by the federal government in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
The only surviving photographs of the net project are twenty-two film negatives by Dorothea Lange. While the factory employed both men and women, Lange focused her camera on the women weavers, capturing the meticulous, monumental, at times hazardous nature of their work. Largely unexamined in academic scholarship and housed only in the National Archives (many public collections hold other Lange WRA pictures), Lange’s depictions of the Manzanar net factory are a window into an understudied aspect of Japanese American incarceration and, six years after Migrant Mother, demonstrate the photographer’s commitment to recording American women enduring major upheavals. My project sheds light on these Japanese American weavers to whom Lange turned her lens, exploring the complexities and significance of their labor at the nexus of photography, camouflage, and the desert.
LENA CHEN (Fall 2025)
Department: Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Project Title: Yellow Power Play: Socially Engaged Performance & Asian American Sex Work
My project examines how contemporary Asian American artists rework racialized tropes, such as the “Dragon Lady,” to confront the psychic wounds of racism and to imagine liberatory queer and feminist futures. My fieldwork with Asian American sex workers, artists, and organizers in Los Angeles and New York explores how histories of immigrant labor, exclusion, and surveillance continue to shape cultural production and everyday life in these communities. Drawing from my longstanding relationships with these interlocutors and my own background as a former sex worker and practicing artist, I take a mixed-methods approach that encompasses autoethnography, archival research, oral history, participant observation, and performance and visual analysis. Blurring the boundaries of performance art, relational aesthetics, and body art, how do Asian American sex workers expose the constructed and fragile nature of race, gender, and sexuality? What do these “immigrant acts” reveal about desires, anxieties, and contradictions embedded in whiteness, patriarchy, and nationhood? Departing from traditional art histories, I analyze how artworks emerge from networks of mutual aid and organizing, offering a new framework for understanding Asian American cultural production as collective, relational, and movement-based. I ask: how do Asian American sex workers use performance to reclaim agency and advance more just racial, gender, and labor conditions in the United States?
MARIA CHI-CHABLE (Fall 2025)
Department: Ethnic Studies
Project Title: Ts'íib and Bordado Practices in the Yucatan Peninsula
My research is situated at the intersection of Indigenous visual studies, cultural production, and decolonial epistemologies, with an interest in the interventions of contemporary Indigenous artists and cultural producers throughout the Americas, but more specifically, in the Yucatan Peninsula region. Central to my research is the concept of ts'íib, a Maya epistemological framework that moves beyond Western logocentric notions of “text” to encompass multimodal forms of knowledge inscription. As theorized by Worley and Palacios (2019), ts'íib constitutes a non-alphabetic literacy that includes several aesthetic practices—writing, weaving, painting, carving, among other forms that archive information and embodied knowledge. Through ts'íib and its unprivileging of the written word, I examine how bordado artists throughout the Peninsula region employ visual and material practices that prompt us to reconsider our analytic engagements; how we relate to, understand, and access meaning(s) embedded in the “text.”
CAMERON GAN (Fall 2025)
Department: Jurisprudence and Social Policy - UC Berkeley Law
Project Title: Bordering on Carcerality: The Global Rise of Punitive Immigration Detention
Over the past several decades, immigration detention has evolved from a limited administrative tool into a core mechanism of migrant control worldwide. Although formally civil in nature, detention increasingly reproduces carceral logics and infrastructures-through indefinite confinement, solitary isolation, securitized surveillance, and the systematic denial of fundamental rights-transforming spaces of migration governance into extensions of the penal realm. While studies of this convergence have been concentrated in Anglo-American contexts, carceral practices of migration control have also proliferated across Asia, South America, and other regions shaped by colonial, authoritarian, and developmental state legacies.
This paper, the first phase of a larger project, synthesizes existing research in English and local-language scholarship, alongside contemporary immigration policy data. It maps how carceral and punitive logics surrounding immigration and detention manifest across different national contexts, identifies the forms of punishment embedded in immigration control, and compares how these practices converge or diverge globally through a (counter) world-society framework. While the paper aims to present a transnational perspective, a large part of the synthesis and analysis would focus on bringing scholarship in the Asian contexts into discussion, exploring how shadow carceral practices manifest across diverse institutional arrangements and sociopolitical often overlooked in carceral state studies.
CAROLINA GITAHY HAMBURGER (Fall 2025)
Department: Berkeley School of Education
Project Title: Children’s Racial Meaning-Making in Anti-Racist Early Childhood Education in Brazil
Racism remains a structuring force in Brazil, shaping children’s experiences from their earliest years of schooling. From the implementation of Law 10.639 in 2003—which mandates the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture—to the rise of global and national mobilizations in 2020, educational institutions were prompted to adopt anti-racist practices, leading early childhood schools to develop new pedagogical approaches. However, little is known about how young children navigate and interpret these efforts. This study examines how children in two early childhood schools in São Paulo, which differ significantly in their demographic and social compositions, make sense of race as they participate in anti-racist projects. Despite assumptions about children’s racial “innocence,” research shows that young children actively interpret and act on racial meanings. Using multi-sited ethnography, I follow children’s talk, play, relationships, and everyday encounters across both settings. The study illuminates how young children navigate, (re)produce, and sometimes challenge racial hierarchies, and what possibilities or tensions emerge within early anti-racist education in Brazil.
SARA JOZER (Fall 2025)
Department: The Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science
Project Title: Mar-a-Lago Face” and Gender Performance as Strategic Tool for Republican Women
In 2024, public discourse identified “Mar-a-Lago face” as a phenomenon in which Republican women, particularly those associated with Donald Trump, utilize exaggerated cosmetic procedures and makeup. I propose a theoretical framework for understanding “Mar-a-Lago face” as the latest instance of strategic gender performance in Republican politics: Republican women use exaggerated feminine appearance to offset the penalties they face when seeking power in a party that upholds gender conservatism. This framework advances research in three ways. First, it separates appearance and behavior as distinct dimensions of gender performance. Whereas prior scholarship emphasizes how women balance communal versus agentic behavior, I argue that Republican women can pursue hierarchy-challenging behaviors while visibly overperforming femininity. Second, it situates “Mar-a-Lago face” within the history of conservative women, who have long leveraged femininity to navigate patriarchal constraints. Third, it illuminates partisan asymmetries. Democratic women face fewer incentives to adopt hyper-feminine appearance, whereas Republican women rely on it to reconcile ambition with traditionalism. I combine observational and experimental evidence to test whether feminine presentation mitigates penalties for hierarchy-violating behavior among Republican women. Given the underrepresentation of Republican women in American politics, this project has implications for understanding the politics of gender presentation and its impact on representation.
JAEBIN LEE (Fall 2025)
Department: Art Practice
Project Title: The Day the Ears Came Out
The Day the Ears Came Out constructs an alternative mythological narrative in which the Virgin Mary reproduces asexually through the ear, subverting patriarchal reproductive logic embedded within Christian theology and Korean Confucian gender ideology. This project reimagines reproduction outside heteronormative structures, challenging the contradictory demands placed on women to be both virgin and mother.
By staging reproduction as an act of narcissistic self-pleasure, the project imagines a world where heterosexual intercourse and male participation become unnecessary. The ear, Christianity's chosen site of immaculate conception to preserve Mary’s purity, is reclaimed and sexualized, becoming an organ of pleasure, a site of self-reproduction, and a visual echo of genital form. The project will be a multimedia exhibition featuring a video installation, performance, sculptures, and digital prints that transform the gallery into a subversive sacred space, taking place in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery in Spring 2026.
SUNNIE LIU (Fall 2025)
Department: UC Berkeley Law, Art Practice
Project Title: Altar / Alter / Altared
Altar / Alter / Altared situates the altar as archive through both recreated and reimagined domestic altars of diasporic families. Building, maintaining, and passing down the domestic altar are rituals of remembrance, redress, and reconciliation. Diasporic families apply critical fabulation in this archival tradition: in choosing which ancestors and narratives to honor through the altars, families fill in archival silences with the histories they want to tell.
In expanding beyond the heteronormative limits of diasporic family altars and traditional archives, the artwork aims to queer not only what an archive can be, but also who it serves. By working with and against the archive, this social practice and installation weaves together personal archives, soundscapes, oral histories, found objects, and visual vernacular stemming from diasporic memories and imaginaries of family altars. Through materiality and abstraction, these domestic altars will be repositories of feelings. As the state increasingly reifies borders and cisheteropatriarchy, Altar / Alter / Altared reaffirms diasporic chosen families’ historicity and envisions alternative futures.
TARA MADHAV (Fall 2025)
Department: History
Project Title: "Normal was never there": Disability, race, and political economy in post-World War II California
In my project "'Normal was never there': Disability, race, and political economy in post-World War II California," I historicize the long afterlife of deinstitutionalization and the fight for Disability Justice from the 1950s to the present in California. While previous histories of disabled communities in 20th century America tend to focus on California, due to its position as the birthplace of the disability rights movement for legal equality in the 1970s, these histories often do not center the poor communities of color that fought to overhaul the legal, political, and social inequities that impacted both disabled and non-disabled communities writ large. Rather than studying “disability” as a non-changing identity, my work, in the words of Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim, “highlights the ideological and rhetorical deployment of ableism within legacies of eugenics, colonialism/neocolonialism, counterterrorism, welfare reform, war, urban redevelopment, and other oppressive practices and structures that route lifesustaining resources away from populations of color.” I look at records about disabled people in institutional contexts like hospitals, schools, and prisons, records from local government authorities, activist groups like Project Return and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, social work organizations, periodicals, and personal letter collections to analyze how, echoing the methodological approach of Saidiya Hartman, state violence operates in the “mundane” and “quotidian” spaces of everyday life that present as non-violent.
ALEX ROCHA-ÁLVAREZ (Fall 2025)
Department: Ethnic Studies
Project Title: Palabra Campesina
Translating to “The Farmworker’s Word,” Palabra Campesina (@palabracampesina) is an oral history project that seeks to honor the lives, voices, and stories of Watsonville's farmworker communities. Based on oral tradition, this project collects testimonies from people who live or have lived in labor camps, migrant housing, or farmworker neighborhoods in the Pájaro Valley.
These communities, formed over generations of migration and labor in California's agricultural fields, are spaces whose deep resilience and activist history has been obscured by geographical isolation. Palabra Campesina seeks to counteract this invisibility by creating a living archive of testimonies—stories of migration, struggle, joy, family, resistance, and everyday life.
Through live storytelling events, oral history interviews, photography, and community gatherings, Palabra Campesina looks to create spaces where campesino voices can be heard and honored on our own terms. The project stems from the conviction that telling our stories not only preserves culture, but also heals, makes visible, and connects generations. By summer 2026, I hope to launch Palabra Campesina’s living digital archive of farmworker testimonies, knowing we all have so much to learn from them!
Evan Sakuma [NAMI] (Fall 2025)
Department: Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Project Title: Dolls of Paradise
Dolls of Paradise is a performance-based research project that asks: What can exist in the night, and what forms of selfhood emerge through trans and māhū drag performance? By centering nightlife as a site of research, the project investigates how trans Pacific Islander performers use performance to generate joy and testimony in the face of displacement and systemic discrimination. I argue that nightlife functions not only as a space of celebration but also as a critical form of knowledge production that links gender diversity, cultural survival, and ecological stewardship.
The project takes inspiration from the bird of paradise plant, a species brought to Hawaiʻi that symbolizes joy and beauty but also indexes colonial displacement. This metaphor resonates with my own position as part of the Japanese diaspora in Hawaiʻi— one of the only places in the U.S. where Japanese Americans were not interned due to their numbers—and with the ongoing disproportionate discrimination faced by trans Pacific Islanders today. By invoking this layered symbol, the project asks how both land and bodies are shaped by histories of migration, colonization, and cultural imagination.
MIRA WASSERMAN (Fall 2025)
Department: History
Project Title: The Indigenous Caribbean, 1491 to the Present
The purpose of my project is twofold: first, to find and expand upon stories that reveal Indigenous Caribbean (often referred to as Taíno) cultural practices and ways of being through late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spanish documents; and two, to analyze the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Taíno Movement within the context of these colonial stories. The analysis will address cultural continuities and discontinuities to determine the methods of preservation, reclamation, and invention of ethnic and racial identity. While research on the Indigenous Caribbean tends to emphasize either the precolonial to early-colonial period or the Taíno Movement of the past fifty years, the resulting dissertation will be a longue durée history of Indigeneity in the Caribbean.
ASHLEY ZHOU (Fall 2025)
Department: Berkeley School of Education
Project Title: “This is the Civil Rights Movement”: 1969 Unionization of New York City Paraprofessionals in Education
This research project will examine the 1969 New York City organizing drive for paraprofessionals in education, which culminated in the decision to be represented by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Black and Latina women were recruited by policymakers for their knowledge of communities of color and worked and organized at the confluence of major historical trends in the twentieth century: the struggle for civil rights, social justice, and self-determination, and the War on Poverty. Amidst these national trends, paraprofessionals realized that unionization was necessary to ensure fair employment practices and treatment in school workplaces. My project will address two research questions: 1) How has paraprofessional labor in education been organized historically?; and 2) In what ways do paraprofessionals in education describe their day to day experiences regarding how they meet or transgress the responsibilities historically associated with the role? This project will explore how paraprofessionals and other union members made sense of the 1969 paraprofessional organizing drive and vote, a landmark moment in community-based organizing about which Velma Hill—civil rights activist, protégé of Bayard Rustin, and eventual head of the UFT paraprofessional chapter—declared, “this is the Civil Rights Movement, as far as I’m concerned” (Juravich, 2024, p. 88).
ANGELINA FU (Fall 2025)
Department: Ethnic Studies, History
Project Title: The School Gate as Infrastructure of Care: Asian American Women’s Affective and Translingual Labor at Multilingual Social Institutions
This project investigates how immigrant Asian American women in Oakland’s Chinatown use multilingual communication to carry out emotional labor within institutional and infrastructural spaces. One of the most overlooked social spaces, it argues, is the school itself as an institution that often operates as a site of disciplinary control and racialization. Through ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews with caregivers and teachers of Lincoln Elementary School, the project acknowledges how women translate between languages such as Cantonese, Mandarin, and English to communicate with teachers and their children. Drawing on theories of emotional labor, translingual practice, “contact zone,” and infrastructural control, the study argues that multilingual exchanges carry affective weight and quietly sustain school routines. While existing literature often highlights children as cultural and linguistic brokers, this project centers women’s unpaid care work in multilingual communication by presenting their voices, showing how immigrant women absorb institutional gaps and maintain social cohesion in ways rarely acknowledged by schools and other social institutions in the United States. Ultimately, the project reveals how multilingual and emotional labor form a crucial but invisible infrastructure of care and the institutional dependence on gendered, racialized care in contemporary America.
JACK GUAN (Fall 2025)
Department: American Studies - Undergraduate Division
Project Title: Mediated Urbanscapes: Social Divisions in the American Built Environment
Americans are increasingly divided along many different social lines whether it’s rich/poor, red/blue, or urban/rural. Economists, political scientists, and sociologists have examined these divisions from their distinct disciplinary angles, but I take an interdisciplinary approach grounded in American Studies to analyze how three social divisions—race, politics, and innovation—reflect in contemporary urban landscapes. I argue that these lines of division simultaneously shape, and are reinforced by, the built environment. Through visual representation, I show how historical redlining has created current neighborhood disparities, how diversity has changed suburban politics, and how the innovation economy has not been evenly distributed across geographies. My research contributes to larger discussion around stratification, and reveals the built connections between social phenomena and placemaking.
BRIZEIDA CRUZ HERNANDEZ (Fall 2025)
Department: Sociology, Legal Studies
Project Title: Intersecting Identities: Exploring the Educational Challenges of Mexican Indigenous Farmworker Students
The presence of Mexican Indigenous farmworkers has increased, leading more Mexican Indigenous families and their children to join the agricultural workforce. Despite their increasing presence, Mexican Indigenous families often face challenges that remain largely unaddressed, including language barriers, economic hardship, limited access to resources, and systemic inequalities in education. Mexican Indigenous children often work alongside their parents in the fields, but we know little about how this affects their education. These students face unique challenges rarely discussed in educational research. Through this research, I will look in-depth at the lived educational experiences of Mexican Indigenous farmworker students. By examining how their Indigenous identities, economic challenges, and language barriers intersect, I will show how these factors impact their academic performance and sense of belonging.
ANABELLE KANG (Fall 2025)
Department: Sociology
Project Title: Understanding Modern Police Vigilantism
Policing has been commonly understood as the use of legitimate violence by representatives of the state, while vigilantism has been conceptualized as the exercise of extra-legal violence. Engaging this basic distinction, scholars have theorized about the overlap between police and vigilantes by pointing to their jointly descended historical function (Hadden 2001), shared membership between police and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (Williams 2015), and self-deputized citizens who act as an appendage to the police (Maher 2021). However, recent investigations have brought attention to an unstudied development in the relationship between policing and vigilantism: the sustained, systematic execution and cover-up of vigilante acts by groups of police officers in their roles as on-duty officials. By examining a specific set of these such cases, I seek to understand: How do police engaging in vigilante acts, targeted communities, and local governments make sense of police vigilantism?
ELAINE LEE (Fall 2025)
Department: Asian American Studies, Sociology, Anthropology
Project Title: Legacies of the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War: Intergenerational Trauma in Korean American Women
This study examines how intergenerational trauma rooted in Japanese imperialism and the Korean War continues to shape the psychological well-being of Korean American women in Koreatown, Los Angeles, home to the largest Korean diasporic community in the United States. Prior research shows that Korean American women experience disproportionately high levels of stress, depression, and somatization compared to other Asian American subgroups, with scholars suggesting that historical legacies of violence and displacement may underlie these disparities (Kim et al., 2019; Lee et al., 2014). Through the collection and analysis of oral histories, this project investigates how the impacts of these historical atrocities manifest across generations in daily life, family and social relationships, socioeconomic experiences, and mental and physical health. Interview questions will explore dynamics of power, self-expression, academic and economic pressure, depression, suicidal ideation, domestic violence, and sexual violence. Narratives will be examined for indicators of inherited trauma—such as silence, shame, obedience, and conformity—to identify patterns that may illuminate broader cultural and psychological trends. Serving as the basis for my senior thesis, this project aims to preserve community histories while advancing scholarship on gendered intergenerational trauma and contributing to ongoing efforts toward acknowledgment, healing, and visibility for Korean American women.
HERNAN RAI ZARAGOZA LEMUS (Fall 2025)
Department: Ethnic Studies
Project Title: Rooted in Community: Sowing the Seeds of Resistance
In Northern California, a growing movement of BIPOC-led (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) farms is reclaiming ancestral land rooted in culture. Grounded in traditional ecological knowledge, these farms are becoming sites of resistance throughout the region. Through land stewardship and cultural preservation, these communities are sowing the seeds of change in the settler colonial system. This research paper will examine how BIPOC-led farms navigate colonial structural barriers while centering on traditional farming practices. Using a decolonial lens paired with Participatory Action Research (PAR), this research will position BIPOC farmers as the creators of the solution their communities need. Through reviewing historical archives and interviewing farm leaders and members, I will explore the strategies these BIPOC-led farms utilize to overcome systemic barriers. By centering the communities in the research, I aim to contribute to the existing scholarship by providing deeper insight into the world of BIPOC-led farms, offering the tools needed to overcome existing barriers, and demonstrating how through land stewardship, we can achieve cultural self-determination.
ANA MARIA AGUILERA LIERA (Fall 2025)
Department: Sociology
Project Title: Policing and Immigration Policy: Exploring Political, Financial, and Physical Impacts on Latina/o/x Students
My research project, Systematic Policing and Immigration Enforcement: Impacts on Political Participation, Financial Burdens, and Physical Well-Being of Latina/o/x Students, examines how racial profiling and state enforcement policies shape the lived experiences of Latina/o/x students in California. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of the sociology of policing and critical Latinx studies, this project explores how encounters with police and immigration authorities affect students’ political participation, economic stability, and physical safety. Using in-depth interviews, I aim to document these experiences, highlighting the physical, financial, and social consequences of hyper-policing and structural inequities. This study addresses a critical gap in research on how systemic enforcement disproportionately impacts marginalized Latinx communities, particularly queer and immigrant students, and how these experiences influence engagement with civic life. Findings from this project will provide insights into the intersections of race, policy, and political participation while informing broader discussions on equity, policing, and immigrant justice.
TOTI NUGMANOVA (Fall 2025)
Department: Haas School of Business, Psychology
Project Title: Mental Health Impacts of Immigration Enforcement and Legal Uncertainty among Asylum Seekers in the U.S.
This study explores how prolonged legal uncertainty and immigration enforcement practices affect the mental health and daily stress of asylum seekers in the United States. Many asylum seekers experience years of waiting for case decisions, living under constant uncertainty and fear of detention, which may contribute to psychological distress and decreased well-being. Through semi-structured interviews and short questionnaires, the study seeks to understand participants’ experiences of stress, coping strategies, and emotional challenges while navigating the asylum process. Approximately 30 adult asylum seekers with pending cases will participate in interviews conducted in English or Russian. The findings aim to highlight the mental health needs of this vulnerable population and inform community and policy efforts to improve psychological support for asylum seekers.
AKIRA ONA (Fall 2025)
Department: Ethnic Studies, Gender & Women's Studies
Project Title: Resculpting Japaneseness: A Case Study on Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun and the Role of Art in Japanese Identity Construction
Through works displaying countries’ technological and artistic prowess, world’s fairs have historically functioned as crucial spaces for nationbuilding as well as racial and ethnic identity formation. The Japan World Exposition, Osaka (Expo ‘70) — held just 25 years after the country’s defeat in World War II — was a momentous occasion for Japan as the first world's fair hosted in Asia. This research will serve as a case study on the artistry and philosophy behind a peculiar sculpture that became the visual symbol of Expo ‘70: the 70-meter tall Tower of the Sun by avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto, representing the Expo’s theme “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” Using archival material from news articles, interviews, and photographs, alongside writings by Okamoto and site visits to museums, I will explore how Okamoto attempted to construct “Japaneseness” through his “re”discovery of prehistoric Japanese aesthetics employed in his design of the Tower of the Sun. This thesis will provide a racial and gendered analysis of Okamoto’s sculpture at the intersection of art history, gender and women’s studies, Asian studies, and ethnic studies to investigate what the role of the artist is in a nation’s reckoning with its Indigenous past.
HELEN PARRA (Fall 2025)
Department: History
Project Title: Literacy Efforts and Race in Socialist Cuba, 1959-1961
On December 22, 1961, thousands of young volunteer teachers, or brigadistas, gathered at Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución to celebrate the proclamation announced by Fidel Castro and the Revolutionary government that Cuba was now a territory free of illiteracy. The announcement marked the culmination of the yearlong nationwide efforts and mobilization that occurred during the Year of Education (1961). How was the Cuban Literacy Campaign successful in increasing literacy rates from around 70% to an astounding 97% in one short year? This thesis aims to challenge the existing narrative that Cuba’s literacy crisis improved in such a short time by centering and exploring the experiences of a few maestros voluntarios whose efforts preceded and created the basis for the 1961 campaign.
The historical narrative of the Cuban Literacy Campaign generally only mentions the volunteer work from Cuban youth, particularly women, who comprised the majority of teaching volunteers known as brigadistas. However, my conversations with the maestros voluntarios, or volunteer teachers, reveal literacy efforts began as early as 1959 directly following the triumph of the revolution. Furthermore, their stories provide insight into our understanding of the Cuban success story combating illiteracy, and also reveal the existing racial tensions that contradict the narrative of a racially harmonious Cuba under a new Revolutionary Government.
JOÃO VITOR SILVA SERRA (Fall 2025)
Department: Psychology
Project Title: The Mental Health of Undocumented Students
The mental health of college students is a major topic of discussion when it comes to academia, but rarely are undocumented students accounted for, not only in research as a whole but also the mental strain that is brought upon by being an immigrant. The dominant explanation for this is simply that not a lot of research has been done surrounding immigrants and their mental health. Although there is a substantial amount of data discussing the stress of the act of immigrating or acculturation, there is still a large gap that needs to be filled with not only a more diverse population, rather than focusing solely on Latinx/Asian immigrants, but also surrounding more complex topics, such as mental health.In this study we used a mixed-methods approach to both interview and survey students at UC Berkeley who all come from various immigrant backgrounds.
ELLA MUI SHONK (Fall 2025)
Department: Linguistics
Project Title: Asian Women with ADHD’s Use of Conversational Overlap and Pause Length Variation Across Social Dynamics
Conversational overlap is often perceived as rude or unacceptable in WASP American contexts, especially within classrooms. Pause length, though less salient to listeners, is also a site of social meaning. But expectations and performances of these variables which are hegemonic in the US aren’t universal(inside or outside it). Existing research has documented variation by neurotype, ethnicity, and gender, including: a tendency towards overlap in individuals with ADHD, varying patterns of pause length and overlap within Asia(and that Asian Americans display patterns different from white peers), and that women display an increased tendency towards cooperative overlap. But little quantitative research explores how ADHD affects the prevalence and distribution of types of overlap and pause length, nor on how these realizations interact with Asian and women identities. This study documents patterns of overlap and pause length among Asian Women with and without ADHD when talking to their friends and professors, and compares patterns between neurogroups and social dynamics. By doing this, I aim to offer a better understanding of the intersection of women, Asian, and neurodiverse identities, as well as unique linguistic discrimination and communicative barriers people at this intersection may face in social and academic settings.
ZORA UYEDA-HALE (Fall 2025)
Department: Ethnic Studies, Society & Environment - Rausser College of Natural Resources
Project Title: Museums in the Age of Climate Crisis: Community-Stewarded Exhibits as Catalysts for Environmental Justice, Desire-Based Storytelling, and Radical Imagination
On view at the Oakland Museum of California from July 2025 to March 2026, "Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain" explores how displacement and land dispossession have affected the East Bay Black community, as well as how they are actively and creatively resisting these systemic harms. The exhibit is a collaborative effort, jointly curated by Black artists, architects, archivists, and community organizations. This Society & Environment Senior Honors Thesis examines "Black Spaces" as a case study, illustrating the museum as a site of narrative power and activation within the environmental justice movement. It seeks to contextualize the history of environmental racism in Oakland, study the exhibit’s desire-based storytelling, and explore avenues to extend "Black Spaces"' impact into the future.