Allen Micheal Wright is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he studies organizations, law and urban redevelopment. His dissertation is a historical case study of the emergence of private-public partnerships for urban redevelopment, with a focus on urban renewal and land banking. By process tracing the case of urban redevelopment in Detroit from 1950 to 2020, he argues that the emergence of land banking is linked to the demise of urban renewal. He tracks the key moments of this gradual transformation of legal institutions and organizational forms across the local field of...
Bruno Anaya Ortiz is a fifth-year student in the Rhetoric Department. His work is at the intersection of legal studies, political theory, and colonial studies. His dissertation analyzes Spanish-American identity formations in Mexico and the US. In Mexico, he analyzed how courts and the constitution define national identity in contradistinction to both ideas of “Indigenous peoples” and the “West.” He argues that this process re-articulates colonial categories that originated in Spain’s evangelical mission. In the US, he studies the changing vocabularies in which the law has incorporated...
Jiahui Duan is a JSD candidate in the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a Lloyd M. Robbins Fellow. Her current research studies workplace sexual harassment issues in China, aiming to understand the development of workplace sexual harassment issues in Chinese society and explore a potential anti-sexual harassment route in the emerging economy and political context such as China’s. Her research is built on substantial fieldwork where she conducts in-depth interviews with individual employees who have been harassed and investigates how they...
Xavier Durham (he/him) is a rising fourth year graduate student in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. His project "Discourse and Private Policing on University Campuses" contends with the rise of private policing in the United States, an employment sector that has sharply outpaced public police and poses new questions for the future of social control, political economy, contemporary governance, and even the future of policing itself. Outside of academia, he enjoys musical theatre, banana bread, and making the occasional viral tweet.
Eduardo Bautista Duran is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law. Originally from Michoacán, Mexico, Eduardo was raised in East San Jose, California. His work focuses on the development of police forces in early statehood California, particularly in Gold Rush-era San Francisco. This genealogicalapproach is designed to capture the rise of policing and other criminal justice institutions as California entered statehood and as San Francisco underwent an explosive transition from a bayside settlement to an international...
Jessie Harney is a PhD student and Graduate Student Researcher at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Her research interests are in criminal justice system reform with a specific focus on mental health and improving outcomes for those whose lives are impacted by the carceral system. She holds degrees in Psychology (BS) from Truman State University, Biostatistics (MS) from Washington University in St. Louis, and Public Policy (MPP) from the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.
Christian Hosam is an incoming fourth year doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Berkeley. Broadly, his interests are in race and politics, with particular interests in Black politics, coalition and conflict between communities of color, public health, and the politics of representation. His dissertation project, Corrupting the Conscience: The Congressional Black Caucus and Constraints of Black Politics, looks at why, even in spite of increasing influence and seniority, the Congressional Black Caucus does not account for corresponding gains for Black...
Cathy Hu is a third year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her work sits at the intersection of punishment and society, social movements, and political sociology, and she is currently working on an ethnographic project examining local community organizing around criminal justice issues. Specifically, this project seeks to understand how activists construct and counter the problem of the criminal court. Prior to starting at Berkeley, Cathy worked as a research analyst at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center in Washington DC, where she evaluated...
Irem Inal is a PhD student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Sociology. She has done research on the factors behind consolidation and organizational change in the credit union industry in the US. Her current work investigates 1) the monitoring of ESG disclosures in Europe and the US from a comparative political economy lens, 2) rural opposition to decarbonization in the US, and 3) the impact of green financing by international organizations on domestic legislation in the Global South.Prior to moving to Berkeley, she lived in Istanbul where she majored in...
George Lambeth is a JSD candidate from the Law School. His work stands at the intersection of law, political economy, financial regulation, comparative law in developing countries, and institutional change. His dissertation deals with the relationship between the development of financial systems in Latin America and their institutional framework over the last hundred years. Traditionally, the comparative legal analysis of finance is frequently dissociated with its institutional origin. In contrast, the research shows that a meaningful comparative account of legal change needs to consider...