Joanna Cardenas is a doctoral student in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, she received a dual B.A. in African American Studies and Legal Studies with honors from Cal. Her research interests are situated at the nexus of critical carceral studies, Disability Studies, and Black Feminist Thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender. Through a close analysis of contemporary California prisons, Joanna’s current work broadly focuses on how systems of confinement inform our understandings around gender, race, and ableism through the enforcement of violence and power. She has also studied how carceral systems impact Black and Latinx women in South Central Los Angeles with a focus on surveillance and other policing practices. Joanna’s research has been supported by the Greater Good Science Center, the Black Studies Collaboratory, and Berkeley’s Haas Scholars Program. As a graduate student, she has served as an instructor in the Department of African American Studies at Berkeley and is a lead graduate researcher in the Justice Interaction Lab. Joanna is involved in litigation challenging prison conditions in California through her work at a law firm.
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