2025 - 2026 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.

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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?

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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.” 

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MARGO JEANNE COHEN (Spring 2026)
Department:  Geography
Project Title:  Transformative Adaptation Within and Beyond the Land-Grant University: Reflections from Participatory Action Research with the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation

In 2016, the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) became the first major public university to divest from fossil fuels, citing this action as being consistent with the principles that have guided the university since its land grant inception in 1893 through the Morrill Act. Yet significant scholarship from Black, Indigenous, and settler colonial studies outlines quite a different set of principles driving the formation of the land-grant university, shedding light on its violent history of land-grabbing as a means of territorial expansion. This legacy is apparent in the rapidly growing field of climate adaptation pioneered by these universities, which tends to promote top-down, technical interventions, such as improving federal floodplain maps, that further entrench settler colonial control over land. For many Environmental Justice (EJ) communities in rural Western Massachusetts—which the state defines as low-income, English language learners, and communities of color—this approach to adaptation overlooks everyday economic precarities, such as housing, as lived realities of climate change. My dissertation research contributes to emerging scholarship on more transformative approaches to ask: How might transformative adaptation address the long histories of land dispossession and resource extraction that shape complex lived realities of climate change for racialized EJ communities in Western MA?

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SHERINE EBADI (Spring 2026)
Department:  Geography
Project Title:  Afghan Refugee Ruptures and Diasporic Futures

This project explores how ambiguities in citizenship and flexibility in regulating legal statuses can support neocolonial violence, with Afghan bodies, narratives, and livelihoods being exploited to produce US global power. The research draws on decolonial methodologies, using focus groups to explore how racialized rhetorics of securitization are codified into law, and how legal status, or lack thereof, becomes embodied in everyday life for those seeking refuge from US-backed forever wars. This work foregrounds intergenerational storytelling and memories, giving testimony to processes of healing, maintaining attachments to homelands, and imagining what just futures might look like through an Afghan diasporic lens.

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RAHEL FISHER (Spring 2026)
Department:  Jurisprudence and Social Policy - UC Berkeley Law
Project Title:  The legal and forensic performance of truth(s): An investigation into rhetorical and legal techniques in cases of disappearances and collective expulsions at Europe's external borders

My research project examines legal techniques, including rhetorical and semiotic practices, in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as humanitarian discourses on violations of the principle of non-refoulement. The research takes as its starting point the exclusion of migrant enforced disappearances as a legal framing of this phenomenon, which would fall under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and would thus make the right to truth (Article 24) claimable in relation to these disappearances. Although the abundance of cases of migrant disappearances has been extensively documented, regional courts and international tribunals have not addressed this phenomenon as enforced disappearances of migrants in their jurisprudence. As a consequence, disappearances of dehistorized (Malkii 1996) and racialized people on the move are subsumed under the category of “missing” and relegated to exclusively liberal humanitarian modes of governance, which shape postcolonial politics through processes of depoliticization (Ferguson, 1994) and discourses of compassion (Ticktin, 2011; Fassin, 2011), while their underlying root causes are ascribed to the natural environment with its opaque “patchwork” of clashing legalities (Mawani, 2018). Against this background, the research project seeks to consider the question of how forensic and legal truths are performatively produced in this context, how these truths gain persuasion, and what effects this production generates,—that is, what kind of juridical subjects and subjectivities are produced as a result. It further interrogates the political economy of evidence in this context and its relationship to the legal archive as topo-nomology.

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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.

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ALE GEISEL-ZAMORA (Spring 2026)
Department:  Anthropology
Project Title:  Experiencing the Menopausal Transition: Embodiment and Perceptions Among Adults in the Salinas Valley, CA

The biocultural dynamic of adverse social and environmental conditions can be embodied with the potential to result in physiological changes affecting health and aging throughout an individual’s life. These conditions include, but are not limited to, the structural injustices disproportionately affecting low-income, Latine people who live in agricultural communities in the United States. Specifically, biologically female Latine individuals who inhabit the nexus of various intersecting adversities remain underrepresented across health-focused research. This is especially true within the menopause literature which relies on predominately white samples, perpetuating the idea of a uniform menopausal experience. This perspective ignores that Latine adults in the US tend to experience more frequent and severe menopausal symptoms compared to non-Latine white adults, ultimately contributing to a lack of adequate care for people of color. As Latine agricultural communities are amongst the most marginalized members of the largest and most rapidly aging minority group in the US, an examination of their reproductive health at midlife is critically needed. This project aims to elucidate how multimodal stressors are embodied among menopausal adults living in the Salinas Valley as well as how such embodiment influences the ways in which one attends to and perceives the menopausal transition.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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LYDIA MATTHEWS (Spring 2026)
Department: History
Project Title: Conceiving the American Plan: Prostitution, Race, and Migration in the North American Western Borderlands, 1907-1925

This project offers a transnational history of anti-prostitution measures by examining the enforcement of these policies in Canadian, U.S., and Mexican cities located in the borderlands of the North American West from 1907 to 1925. During this period, the U.S. government passed two pieces of legislation aimed at regulating sex work: the Mann Act of 1910 and Section 13 of the Selective Service Act of 1917. The former prohibited the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes, while the latter criminalized prostitution and the operation of brothels in close proximity to military establishments during the First World War. Both pieces of legislation were necessarily concerned with policing sexual behavior along geographic borders and were, in many ways, anti-immigrant measures. This project traces the enforcement of earlier, local laws targeting prostitution alongside the Mann Act and Section 13, centering the role of local officials in shaping national policy and emphasizing the relational construction of race in these borderlands spaces. It also aims to integrate Black and Native history into scholarship on immigration, highlighting transnational migration patterns along both the northern and southern borders and the questions of sovereignty raised by anti-vice policing.

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KARLA MENDEZ (Spring 2026)
Department: History of Art
Project Title: Conditions of Friendship: SoHo Women Artists

This ongoing project theorizes friendship as a critical condition for artistic production, political action, and survival within the feminist art world of the United States from the 1960s through the 1990s. Focusing on artists Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Vivian Browne, and May Stevens, I ask: how did practices of correspondence, collaboration, and care function as conditions for the possibility of friendship and how did these relations shape artistic production across racial difference?

I argue that friendship among these artists operated as a form of political and artistic labor, a practice that allowed artists to negotiate the intersecting exclusions of race and gender that structured access to institutions, visibility, and authorship. Beginning with a photograph documenting a 1979 sit-in at Artists Space, I trace how friendship materialized through correspondence, collaborative publications, and shared institutional and domestic spaces, positioning these practices as constitutive rather than supplementary to artistic work. Grounded in feminist theory and critical race analysis, this study reconceptualizes inclusion not as an achieved ideal but as an ongoing political problem. It aims to reveal how these practices of friendship and alliance both exposed and contested the uneven conditions under which feminist solidarities were formed, sustained, and remembered.

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NATALIE PASQUINELLI (Spring 2026)
Department: Sociology
Project Title: Working from Home and Working in Homes: Time, Space, and the Organization of (Re)Productive Labor in Remote Work Households

Remote work has persisted since the COVID-19 pandemic as a “family friendly” arrangements for parents, said to ease the competing demands of work and family. My dissertation research provides a critical corrective to this narrative by theorizing working from home as a particular way of organizing productive and reproductive labor in the context of a capitalist crisis of care. I study the homes of remote workers as a triple workplace: a site of paid remote work, unpaid domestic work, and paid domestic work. These labor processes are negotiated through multiple overlapping relations of (re)production: those of remote employee and employer, of gendered relations in the family, and of classed and racialized relations between domestic workers and employing family. I focus on the Bay Area as a site with intersecting conditions of extreme inequality, housing scarcity, skyrocketing care costs, and a high prevalence of remote work to ask two questions. First, how does remote work reorganize the labor of “work” and “home” materially and conceptually for a household? How are time, space, silence, solitude, and surveillance allotted to different labor and laborers? Second, how do strategies of reorganization reflect and (re)shape gendered, classed, and racialized relations of labor in private homes?

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LORAIN KHALIL RIHAN (Spring 2026)
Department: Art Practice
Project Title: Remembering Majdalawi Weaving

Remembering Majdalawi Weaving is a research based arts project on cultural memory preservation of the historical weaving tradition from Al-Majdal, a village located along the Mediterranean Coast in historic Palestine. Al-Majdal was once home to about 800 weaving looms before the colonization of Palestine. The tradition began to disappear in 1948 when the village was ethnically cleansed. Few Palestinians could take their looms with them and the tradition nearly disappeared. In the 1980s-1990s, the children of Majdalawi weavers revived the tradition in Gaza. The tradition once again faces the threat of disappearance in the current iteration of genocide. The research for this project will inform a body of work that which emulates and responds to Majdalawi weavings, and embeds Palestinian land based practices.

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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!

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KIARA SAMPLE (Spring 2026)
Department: Art Practice
Project Title: Remembering Majdalawi Weaving

My research examines how contemporary Black herbalists and rootworkers in the United States forge alternative epistemologies for understanding the body, self, community, and conceptions of life and death in relation to nature. Working with Black feminist ethnographic methods, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this research seeks to further understand the forms of relationality emerging from seeing nature as alive and sentient. It interrogates how an intimate relationship with plants develops a political consciousness that shapes understandings of gender and sexuality, challenges racial logics of extraction, and nurtures alternative ways of relating to both the earth and each other. Centering embodied, sensorial, and divinatory ways of knowing, I treat the uses of plant matter in medicinal and spiritual practice as repositories of a Black consciousness holding alternative models for Black sensibilities and forms of relating. This research seeks to contribute meaningfully to Black feminist theory, Black ecologies, Queer theory, and the Environmental humanities by demonstrating how contemporary Black herbal and rootwork practitioners work with nature to create spaces of refusal and sustainability amid ecological disaster, while offering new perspectives on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and nature.

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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.

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CRISTINA VIOLANTE (Spring 2026)
Department: Jurisprudence and Social Policy - UC Berkeley LawProject Title: "When Textualism Replaced Common Sense:” Reassessing How We Read Statutory Law

Over the past forty years, the conservative legal movement has harnessed the federal judiciary as a site for right-wing activism. My research examines one element of this: the use of interpretive method as a supposedly neutral means of achieving political outcomes. Practitioners at the Supreme Court have propagated a new methodology for reading statutes, textualism, which privileges statutory language—as opposed to legislative intent or purpose—in resolving interpretive disputes. Textualists claim that the method facilitates objectivity, yet in practice, it is manipulated to achieve favorable outcomes.

Feminist Jurisprudence and Critical Race Theory have long demonstrated the ways in which the law constructs categories of race and gender. My research explores the role of interpretive method in that process, contextualizing the rise of textualism in the backlash against both the Warren Court and its dismantling of Jim Crow apartheid, and the “rights revolution” of the 1960s and 70s. How is it that interpretive method became a site for politics within the federal judiciary, and how can we move beyond it?

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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.

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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).