Student

Cathy Hu

PhD Candidate
Sociology

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

BELS Fellow

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...

Jenae Carpenter

Jenae Carpenter is a PhD student in Sociology. Her dissertation project combines historical and ethnographic methods to parse hyperincarceration in settler colonies, where different mechanisms and forces have produced similar spikes in criminal confinement (eg, Aboriginals in Australian, Native Americans in the US, métis in Canada). As part of this project, she is midway through an ethnographic study of a small town on the Northern tip of Australia, following public defenders and using the court as a window into the penal state. As a BELS...

Joanna Cardenas

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...

Kendrick Manymules

2025-2026 BELS Fellow

Kendrick Manymules (Diné) is a PhD candidate in the department of Geography. Kendrick is a citizen of the Navajo Nation from Fort Defiance, AZ. He is Honágháahnii, born for Tsi’naajinii. Before beginning doctoral studies, Kendrick received their S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his Master of City Planning from MIT. Broadly, Kendrick is interested in Indigenous studies, land, and dispossession. His dissertation project is concerned with the Diné land question and seeks to understand how land in the Navajo Nation has been historically...

Krisztina Petra Gula

CSLS Visiting Student Researcher

Krisztina Petra Gula is a Ph.D. candidate in criminal justice at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Hungary and works as a legal and financial expert. She arrived at CSLS as a visiting researcher with Fulbright and Rosztoczy scholarships. Her experience stems from the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the edition of Lawyr.it, an international project and journal of law and political science students in Central and Eastern Europe. She graduated from ELTE Law and holds a postgraduate degree in economics from the Corvinus University of...

Kyneshawau Hurd

Kyneshawau Hurd is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy graduate program in, and JD graduate of University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She studies the intersections of Dominance, Diversity, and Discrimination and the implications for various arenas such as education and tech. In addition to her graduate studies and research, she applies her social science expertise to real-world organizational contexts as a DEI researcher, facilitator, and practitioner.

George Lambeth

JSD Candidate
Law

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...

Lara Schiffrin-Sands

Lara Schiffrin-Sands is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Broadly, her research interests include the carceral state, childhood, family life and the sociology of emotions. Her dissertation draws from 12 months of embedded ethnographic fieldwork in a rural southern state. It started as a project about school based law enforcement in rural schooling, but quickly evolved into a multi-sited study. The project follows a group of kids and their families as they navigate school, therapy, and in some cases, juvenile court. It interrogates the role of these...

Laura Ramirez

Laura Ramírez is a Ph.D. student in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law. Her research focuses on legal history with a particular interest in islands as sites of legal pluralism and creativity in colonial and expansionist contexts. Within those contexts, Laura is interested in the legal justifications for capture and rule in relation to land, property, labor, and resource extraction. Before Berkeley, she received a B.A. in English and Economics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and an M.A. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University.