Current Fellows

Emily Reigh, Assistant Professor, Science Education

“Community-Based Climate Justice Learning in Pajaro Valley Schools”

IST Seed Grant funding will be used to support a community summit on justice-focused climate science learning in Pajaro Valley.  The summit will bring together local stakeholders, including environmental justice advocates, teachers, K-12 students, district staff, climate scientists, and educational researchers.  Each stakeholder will share about their current climate-focused work and future priorities.  Collectively, the group will envision new directions for climate science learning opportunities in Pajaro Valley that are grounded in the principles of community self-determination, justice and transformative action. 

Scott Winton, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies

“Pasture fire and peatland carbon storage in the Colombian Llanos”

The burning of tropical peatlands exacerbates the climate crisis, however there is no understanding of how fire interacts with peatlands in the Colombian Llanos. From prior observations, fire spillover from pastures to peatlands in this region occurs, but the implications for peatland soil carbon stocks are not known. In this study we will visit 12 previously identified peatlands—6 with and 6 without evidence of fire—and interview adjacent ranch managers on fire use and local fire histories. To reconstruct fire chronologies deeper than living memory we will date and analyze peat cores for charcoal content. We will assess the potential for changes in ranching practice to mitigate further carbon loss as an agroecological climate solution.

Amy Argenal, Assistant Teaching Professor, Sociology

“Understanding advocacy around the root causes of migration- Transnational Solidarity in Central America and beyond”

Over the past few months, the issue of immigration reform has been front and center in political debates and is hyper-focused on the security of the U.S./ Mexico border. Immigrant rights activists are pushing back, and demanding a more humane and just immigration reform, however, in these debates, the root causes of migration are often left aside. This project aims to investigate the advocacy on the root causes of migration through a long-term participatory research project in collaboration with organizations along the U.S.-Mexico border and in Central America. This proposal aims to utilize participatory research to fully understand the role of transnational solidarity in combating the root causes of migration from Central America.

Lily Balloffet, Associate Professor, Latin American & Latino Studies

“American Venom: Animals, Science, and Hemispheric Relations”

In response to recent calls for transdisciplinary, cross-sector initiatives related to human conflicts with venomous animals (snakes, spiders, scorpions), I investigate how historical contexts of animal envenoming and antivenom production at global and regional levels impact health and pharmaceutical access disparities today. My research leverages natural history, animal biology and physiology, and multi-species ethnographic approaches to render an integrative framework for theorizing hemispheric mobilities. I link narratives of public health, scientific research, labor migration, and expansion of multinational corporations, to landscapes of environmental change, and conservation

René Espinoza Kissell, Assistant Professor, Education

“School Debt Under Fiscal Surveillance: A Comparative Case Study of State Takeovers of California Districts”

Education leaders across the country are under pressure to cut growing deficits through school closures and austere budget cuts, disproportionately in working-class Black and Brown communities. Some struggling school districts undergo a “takeover” of their local public schools, a policy mechanism where a democratically-elected school board is replaced with a single state administrator to govern the district. This phase of my study focuses on an emergent state-wide coalition bridging grassroots efforts across five California districts to illuminate the consequences of state intervention in managing fiscal crises facing public schools. Research findings will be leveraged to bridge grassroots political education with state advocacy campaigns.

David Gordon, Associate Professor, Politics

“The contested politics of (de)legitimating transformative climate urbanism”

As local governments position themselves as leaders in the global response to the climate crisis there is a need to think carefully about what they can accomplish, and whether in fact, we have any reason to believe they can bring their ambitious goals to fruition. This project focuses on how local governments claim legitimacy as agents of transformative change, how that legitimacy is contested by actors with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and how this process plays out across diverse urban contexts. Ultimately, this project will uncover and help us better understand the politics that inform whether local governments can deliver on their transformative agendas.

Nidhi Mahajan, Assistant Professor, Anthropology

“Unruly Infrastructure: Contesting Past, Present, and Future in the Indian Ocean”

This project seeks to understand the material and imaginary significance of maritime-based infrastructure projects in the western Indian Ocean. Focusing on the postcolonial transformation of Kenya’s ancient port city of Lamu, I ask: How do the past and historical memory shape the mega-infrastructure projects of the 21st century? How do infrastructure projects and their representation become sites for re-imagining the self, community, and citizenship? I will foreground local perspectives on the Lamu Port and Lamu-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor, or LAPSSET. This multi-billion dollar project funded largely by Chinese investors seeks to mechanize both land and sea at an unprecedented scale. My main aim is to do justice to this multiplicity of voices and lifeworlds connected to port-making in Kenya and the larger western Indian Ocean by building local collaborations to apply for external funding.

Sara Niedzwiecki, Associate Professor, Politics

“Immigrants and the Welfare State in South America”

Since 2015, over seven million Venezuelans have left their country, leading to an extraordinary scale of intra-South American migration. During these same years, millions of citizens in the region accessed basic income and better-quality healthcare. This project studies these dual trends and analyzes whether social policies effectively incorporate immigrants in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia. It shows that immigrants have more impediments to accessing the welfare state than citizens, even for universal public health, but especially for targeted social assistance. This derives from a combination of political elites’ and voters’ views around the degree to which immigrants “deserve” access to different types of policies.

Alonso Villacorta, Assistant Professor, Economics

“Exploring heterogeneity in the bank lending channel and the value of bank-firm networks”

This project proposes to empirically examine the bank lending channel in macrofinance, focusing on the heterogeneous impact of bank credit supply shocks on firms and employees. Utilizing advanced econometric and machine learning techniques, it aims to quantify these effects, considering the heterogeneity in bank-firm relationships and network dependencies.

The project will address methodological challenges in identifying bank and firm credit shocks, contributing to a deeper understanding of the transmission of financial shocks and monetary policy. This approach will enable policymakers to investigate how banks adjust their credit supply to firms during credit events like recessions or monetary policy contractions, quantify the value of lending relationships and the bank-firm-worker network, and uncover which types of firms and workers are more or less vulnerable to credit events, thereby contributing to more effective policy design.

Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor, Anthropology

“Supernatureculture: Beyond the Anthroposecular”

My book manuscript, Supernatureculture: Beyond the Anthroposecular, tracks the relationship between secular modernity and the Anthropocene. I argue that the ethical, epistemological, and ontological orientations of the Anthropocene – the centering of humans as masters of our universe; the denigration of our vulnerability to others, including nonhumans; and the instrumentalist logic of capitalist rationality – are an effect of secularity. Ironically, responses in the academy to the Anthropocene have largely reproduced a secular notion of nature and natureculture. Yet, most communities affected by climate crisis live in multispecies ecologies that include not only humans, animals, plants, insects, birds, and microbes, but also ancestor spirits, jinn, gods, goddesses, and so on. Through the concept of supernatureculture, my book offers more capacious ways to think about the nonhuman or more-than-human and suggests that the more-than-natural may be a useful concept as well, to reimagine more-than-human worlds – both their destruction and their survival – beyond secular limitations, including those of the academy. 

Carla Hernández Garavito, Assistant Professor, Anthropology

“Reinvention and Colonialism: A Local History of Community and Empire in the Peruvian Andes Between the 15th and 18th centuries”

“Reinvention and Colonialism” investigates the experience of successive colonialism through the history of a single community in the Peruvian Andes. Grounded on archaeological, historical, and geospatial methods, my book centers on the people of the highland region of Huarochirí (Lima, Peru) and their engagements with the Inka (1450-1532 CE) and Spanish (1532-1821 CE) empires. Research on the negotiated adaptation to colonial policies has become the de facto way to understand Indigenous identities in colonial contexts, reinforcing the homogenization of the communities that lived through the process. My book inverts this scholarship and is instead driven by the question: what if the Inka and Spanish were an addition to local history rather than the filter through which we discuss the diverse and complex communities that inhabited the Andes? I argue that, in the face of drastic socio-political changes, the people of Huarochirí turned to their history, creating analogies, shared spaces, and transformations on the practices that marked ideas of “civilization” for the invading empires to integrate their subjection into local history. By centering on the creativity and endurance of this community, my book explores how they crafted spaces of political and social action where colonial systems meant to leave none.

Liv Hoversten, Assistant Professor, Psychology

“Elucidating the neurocognitive mechanisms of bilingual language control through eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs)”

Psycholinguists have commonly studied language processing in monolinguals. However, bilingualism is the norm worldwide, not the exception. A deeper understanding of bilingual cognition is therefore becoming increasingly relevant as globalization requires people of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate effectively with one another. My research program investigates written and spoken communication in bilingual and multilingual speakers using eye-tracking and electroencephalographic (EEG/ERP) measures. These methods have traditionally been used separately, usually by separate groups of researchers. With the advent of new technologies enabling their alignment, my lab is uniquely poised to lead the field in the innovative use of this co-registration technique to shed new light on bilingual cognition. This workshop will facilitate discourse on this synergistic research trajectory by assembling a group of senior scholars with expertise in each of these methods to study the bilingual mind and brain. Furthermore, it will boost transformative research that reaches beyond academia to the wider public through community-engaged scholarship within the field of psycholinguistics via organizations like Bilingualism Matters.

Maywa Montenegro, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies

“Toward Emancipatory Technologies: an Engaged Research Agenda”

From grain elevators to petri dish meat, agrarian history is paved by technologies that have polluted and homogenized ecosystems, undercut rural communities’ expertise, and concentrated food system power among monopolistic corporations. Unsurprisingly, the latest proposals for a food systems revolution based on big data, AI, and digitalization have been met with significant skepticism by movements for agroecology and food sovereignty. However, activists and scholars recognize that technological systems are not merely tools; they are produced through specific social relations, including political-economies and cosmovisions. As such, technology is not something only to be resisted – its infrastructures, structures, and knowledge systems must be fought for. What does it mean to speak of emancipatory technologies? Under what social conditions are they possible? Whose expertise matters? This workshop will map an engaged research agenda for emancipatory technologies: the imagination and enactment of technological systems that disrupt colonial-modern imaginaries of domination/control, that lead, rather than end, with political-economic questions, and that are developed with and by communities on the frontlines of food sovereignty struggles today.