Professor of Environmental Studies, Sikina Jinnah discusses the possibilities and consequences of solar geoengineering, which could have the impact of turning our blue sky white. Sikina Jinnah has spent a lot of time thinking about the possibilities and consequences of solar geoengineering. Her work has put her at the table with many of the figures featured in Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, “Under a White Sky” and she has wrestled with the issues they and Kolbert raise around solar geoengineering technology, particularly as related to international politics and global oversight.
Q&A with Changemakers
Q&A with Serena Campbell
Serena Campbell constructs a vital network to unite UCSC’s critical environmentalism research across departments and disciplines. When Serena Campbell (Merrill ’23, sociology, critical race and ethnic studies) arrived at UCSC, it transformed her environmental worldview. Now, Campbell is working towards transforming UCSC’s own environmental research and pedagogy through her work with the Building Belonging Program.
Q&A with Building Belonging Fellows
As the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Internship Project (CUIP) intern for the Institute for Social Transformation (IST), Karina Diaz Alvarez wanted to learn more about the students who are engaged in the Building Belonging Program. Karina, a psychology and legal studies double major, centered her project around elevating student voices and highlighting their experiences in the program. Karina worked with a small sample of students, in collecting their testimonials and diving deeper into their incredible projects.
Q&A with Rekia Jibrin
Rekia Jibrin is an assistant professor in critical studies of education within UC Santa Cruz’s Education Department. Her research, which focuses on how schools shape the racial order in the United States and globally, will help focus on teacher needs around ethnic studies work and identifying knowledge that can inform ethnic studies curriculum in county school districts.
Q&A with Zahirah Suhaimi
Anthropology doctoral candidate Zahirah Suhaimi chose to attend UC Santa Cruz for its creative and cutting-edge research, radical activism, and a collaborative atmosphere. Now a Ph.D. student with over a dozen grants and awards under her belt, Suhaimi is interested in behavioral and ecological patterns, the stories underlying them, and how they are significant for community resilience and development.
Q&A with MR Macgill and Ho Nam
Transforming Futures—a program launched by UC Santa Cruz’s Institute for Social Transformation—awards scholarships to first generation, underrepresented, and/or low-income UCSC students to pursue unpaid internships over the summer. The rollout of the program would not have been possible without the support of MR Macgill and Ho Nam. Their generosity created career-changing opportunities for UCSC students.
Q&A with Amanda Safi
Thanks to a scholarship from IST’s Transforming Futures program, third-year politics student Amanda Safi (John R. Lewis ’24, politics) spent her summer interning for the House of Representatives at the Office of Congressman Jimmy Panetta. An experience she says enhanced her educational experience at UCSC, and allowed her to explore a career path she hadn’t been able to before.
Q&A with Aissata Ba
Aissata Ba, a 20-year-old Black Muslim first-generation American, was selected from a competitive pool of college students from around the United States to be part of a conversation with Michelle Obama on some of the themes addressed in her best-selling memoir Becoming. “One of the things that we were talking about was the experience of being a first generation college student,” Ba remembered, “and feelings of imposter syndrome.
Q&A with Katherine Quinteros
Katherine Quinteros, a second-year PhD student in Social Psychology who received the Chancellor’s Graduate Internship/Campus Fellow Award for Building Belonging Through Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration and winner of the Graduate Research Symposium Best of the Social Sciences Division Award. Katherine’s work evaluating the Building Belonging program has helped identify essential key levers of change that influence university belonging, and potentially retention, for minoritized students.
Q&A with Terri McCullough
Alumna Terri McCullough is Chief of Staff to the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. She has spent her career advancing the participation of women and girls through policy and programs. Most recently, she served as CEO of the Clinton Foundations No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, an initiative to evaluate and promote progress in gender equity globally.
Q&A with Erika Zavaleta
Professor Erika Zavaleta is a recognized leader on multiple fronts within conservation biology and sustainability. Her research studies how humans are changing the diversity of land-based plant and animal communities. She works closely with conservation organizations, governments, and communities to support better management of natural resources and was recently appointed to the California Fish and Game Commission by Governor Gavin Newsom
Q&A with Breanna Byrd & Chris Lang
Chris Lang, a graduate student in Environmental Studies and intern for the People of Color Sustainability Collective (POCSC), and Breanna Byrd, a graduate student in Feminist Studies and intern at the African American Resource and Cultural Center, discuss their experiences around environmental justice and the motivation for their activism.
