2025 Faculty Grantees and Fellows

This grant supports a working group examining digital platform ecologies and survival strategies of Chinese-speaking immigrant workers in the U.S. amidst the surge in Chinese asylum migration since 2021. Through interviews and ethnography, we analyze how these workers navigate and reshape platform-based labor markets, while building mutual aid networks. Our research challenges elitist and high-tech stereotypes of East Asian immigrants, providing scholarly and policy insights into platform economies and undocumented migration, emphasizing resilience and organizing potential in a hostile socio-political climate. We aim to expand into a comparative research network exploring undocumented and refugee workers from non-Spanish speaking communities.

This project analyzes the history of deportation in South America prior to the creation of modern borders. Drawing upon colonial manuscripts from seven countries, it balances a structural analysis of the phenomenon with a focus on the lived experiences of deportees. Numerous studies address deportations to South America, but few consider deportations across and from the region, and as a result, historical variations in the practice remain undertheorized. The present study demonstrates how deportees were more commonly expelled to contested borderlands than across established interstate borders. It reveals connections between penal deportation, the forced migration of Indigenous Americans and Africans, and the policing of sexuality.

This community-based project explores cultural productions, art, and revival of history for mental health goals and the contributions of Indigenous knowledge to psychotherapeutic models amongst the Yemeni Muslim community. I will examine this question through ethnographic fieldwork with the Yemeni diaspora in Detroit, Michigan. This fieldwork will explore how Yemeni refugees abroad navigate what has been deemed a collective mental health crisis within the community, but also the abjection of their image as beggar, impoverished, and transgressive migrant. Using mixed methods, I will consider the potential reparative work of the imagination and the effects of geopolitics on psychic wellbeing.

This project aims to understand how intractable political divides emerge in childhood development, so that we can identify the best entry points to educate and intervene on the negative consequences of political partisanship. This project will first conduct a literature review to formulate an integrative model of political partisanship development in early childhood. Using this model, we then aim to generate pilot data to test predictions about how ideology and ingroup tendencies interact in producing children’s political biases. The funding will help produce a literature review paper and pilot data for NSF CAREER and Russell Sage Foundation grant applications.

In June 2020, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in California passed the “George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate School Police” (Resolution No. 1920-0260) (GFR), which abolished OUSD’s school police department. Scholars and practitioners are at the helm of a critical moment to illuminate what happens to racial inequalities when district policy makers act to diminish police presence in schools. I will collect data using focus groups and interviews with OUSD students who are part of the GFR design team to understand how Black and Latinx high school students are experiencing discipline and feelings of safety in the wake of the GFR.

This project develops a partnership with the London Nelson Legacy Initiative to research and share the stories of Black pioneers in pre-1900s Santa Cruz County, working to identify, restore, and preserve historical burial sites as a sacred act of cultural care and place-keeping. We will form a multidisciplinary team to conduct archival research, oral history collection, and community engagement, fostering a deeper understanding of Black pioneers’ contributions to the region’s cultural and social fabric. Funding will support a grant proposal to the Mellon Foundation, whose priorities include preserving cultural landmarks, such as cemeteries, as spaces of memory and enduring significance.

Agroecology is often perceived as antithetical to technology, due to historical frictions with technology-centered industrial agriculture. Yet, agroecologists have their own technological visions and futures. They have creative ways of bootstrapping, repurposing, and reimagining how dominant sociotechnical systems can work in new ways. This project maps the politics, practices, and narratives of emancipatory technologies for agroecology, using the United Nations High Level Panel of Experts 13 Principles of Agroecology as an index. Cases include the global Assembly for Grassroots Innovations in Agroecology, US-based OpenTEAM, India’s Honeybee Network, the African Food Sovereignty Alliance, and the California-based Critical-Inclusive AgTech community.

In the early 1900s, Elizabeth Kerr surveyed birds of the lowland jungles of Chocó in Colombia, but her story and legacy were buried by traditional patriarchal narratives of the history of ornithology studies in one of the globe’s biodiversity hotspots. This project aims to resurvey the birds from the Kerr expeditions, with a focus on community engagement and gender equity. Two scouting field visits will enable our team to gather pilot data, identify and build authentic collaborations with local scientists and community members, and identify expedition sites and logistics to lay the groundwork for a National Geographic Explorers Grant proposal.

Insomnia and depression are public health concerns for high school students. Cultivating strong social relationships and school belonging may support students in facing daily challenges. My lab will examine associations between marginalization, daily feelings of school belonging and support from family and friends, and daily sleep and emotional well-being. We will recruit 150 high school students to complete a baseline survey and a three-week protocol, for which each day they will report daily stressors, emotions, sleep duration and restfulness, as well as feelings of belonging to their school, family, and friends. Findings will have implications for how strengthening students’ relationships can affect how they deal with subsequent stressors.

California is home to 10.5 million immigrants, nearly 20% of whom are undocumented. Due to exclusion from employment and social services, denial of basic rights, and targeting by law enforcement, undocumented immigrants are likely at greater risk of premature death and death from treatable causes. But gaps in mortality data collection obscure possible mortality consequences of immigrant exclusion. This project will use a novel method for studying mortality trends by legal status in California to answer urgent questions about the role of legal status in stratifying mortality risk and the potential for inclusive policy change to buffer those inequities.

Many African countries have limited ability to produce, multiply and disseminate improved planting materials, reducing yields and increasing susceptibility to diseases. This is particularly challenging for vegetatively propagated crops like cassava, which have bulky cuttings that must be replanted soon after harvest, so that farmers can only source materials locally. This study will experimentally boost local supply in Rwanda, by offering a treatment group of cooperatives an opportunity to become certified cutting multipliers. We will estimate effects on (a) disease prevalence, yields, and revenue for cooperatives; and (b) purchase of improved cuttings for individual farmers near cooperatives. We plan to measure impacts for 2 seasons.

This project studies how and why region-specific strategies vary in their approaches to defining the public interest in developing bio-pharma innovation hubs. We will consider the economic geography of value capture in global production networks, urban studies work on global city development, and efforts to expand affordable access to biomedical innovation. We will evaluate how policy makers navigate the trade-offs between economic benefits for local regional economies and health benefits to national societies from investments in bio-pharma innovation. Comparing case studies in the U.S., Europe, and South Africa, we will gather data to prepare a National Science Foundation grant proposal.

Gender Transformative Education (GTE) is an educational framework that works toward gender equality through education. It was developed by the United Nations Girls Education Initiative (UNGEI) and other international bodies in 2021. This collaborative research project engages critically with this concept through a multi-sited, multi-scalar institutional ethnography. Our work is conducted in partnership with UNGEI, Purposeful (a global hub for girls’ activism), and young feminist activists who are part of these two networks. Spout Grant funding will allow our project team to deepen relationships, conduct site visits with potential local partners, and collect data at upcoming international and regional gatherings.

As one of the wealthiest countries on the continent, South Africa has long attracted African migrants. But as South Africans experience increasing socioeconomic challenges and crime, there has been a rise in prejudice against African immigrants. This has posed significant barriers to migrants’ ability to access vital basic services like healthcare and education, despite domestic laws that protect migrants’ right to access these services. This project will improve the rights awareness and legal literacy, and thus, the rights consciousness of African migrants, helping them recognize the issues they encounter with these services as legal problems—rights violations worthy of legal intervention—and empowering them to advocate for themselves through the law. 

This project aims to build and test a theoretical coaching framework that advances both conceptual mathematics learning and intersectional justice. Specifically, our team will establish and sustain an authentic partnership with Black disabled youth in Oakland, where a pilot study will be conducted. The voices and experiences of these youth with mathematics education will be central in informing the development of this project’s intersectional justice coaching theoretical framework (ICF). This project will subsequently use that framework to build and test a coaching model that will support high school mathematics teachers toward more equitable instruction that benefits all types of learners.

This project will study how racial discrimination for housing affects the financial well-being and employment opportunities of disadvantaged households. Our research brings together comprehensive credit histories for millions of Americans with data on real estate properties and results from a large field experiment on housing discrimination in order to address three main research questions. First, we will characterize the populations vulnerable to housing discrimination, in terms of credit scores and related characteristics. Second, we will examine how these credit characteristics interact with housing discrimination in determining who has access to residential locations. Finally, our project will consider the longer-term financial and employment impacts of housing discrimination on affected households.

This project will host workshops for local K-12 teachers and school leaders to apply lessons from the second edition of Amplifying the Curriculum: Designing Quality Learning Opportunities for Multilingual Learners. The book argues for a shift from “simplification” to “amplification” as the guiding principle for the education of multilingual learners. Workshops will focus on how teachers can teach history as inquiry and “reading like historians,” as opposed to “patriotic” indoctrination or mere memorization of facts. Each workshop, co-facilitated by teacher leaders, will include sample activities and discussion of potential collaborations to develop future amplified learning opportunities for multilingual learners.

Since 2020, I have collaborated with educators, artists, and scholars to re-present my scholarly findings on racial justice teacher activism in the form of comics. By showcasing moment-to-moment practices for social transformation enacted by teachers of color in classroom, school, and community settings through storytelling and visual arts, these research products expand more accessible engagement and dissemination of scholarly findings that communicate complex social processes and critical theories related to racial justice education. This grant funding will support creative collaboration activities, publication, and dissemination of these art-based research products in a book manuscript written for educators, practitioners, and scholarly audiences.

This forthcoming book project ethnographically examines how the U.S. deportation regime and asylum deterrence policies have transformed the U.S.-Mexico borderland region into a zone of captivity for asylum seekers and deportees. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2018, this project examines the everyday lives and survival strategies of these communities in Tijuana, Mexico. Moving between migrant and homeless encampments, governmental and private shelters, drug rehabilitation centers, and activist-run medical clinics, this project analyzes the lives of those subjected to intersecting forms of confinement, expulsion, and attrition at the U.S.-Mexico border.

This workshop focuses on two articles proposing critical interventions in ethnographic research methodology, challenging traditional extractive practices and advancing de/anti-colonial and relational approaches. The first article interrogates the ethnographic archive as a site of colonial power and argues that transcription is inherently politicized. It introduces a decolonial analytic method to examine absences, erasures, and suppressed potentialities, providing tools to uncover epistemic violences and reimagine ethnographic practices. The second article reimagines the qualitative interview as a relational and pedagogical process, critiquing hierarchical dynamics and advancing ethical, dialogical, and transformative research designs. Together, these articles advance the field of qualitative inquiry.

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 schools, a policy mechanism where a democratically-elected school board is replaced with a single state administrator to govern the district. My research program brings together theoretical questions about the control of schools in society with the practical financial and political challenges to reinvesting in public education. My project examines coalition-building efforts in California, and provides community stakeholders with research-based, public resources on school finance inequities.