Student

Xavier Durham

PhD Candidate
Sociology
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

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...

Alinaya Fabros

Alinaya Fabros is a PhD candidate in Sociology studying labor globalization, political economy, and transnational social reproduction. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics and MA in Sociology from the University of the Philippines and UC Berkeley. Her dissertation is a comparative study of two longtime migrant labor regimes that developed in neighboring Philippine villages following the 1974 New Labor Code, the law often cited for producing the most globalized labor force on the planet and generating the emigration governance model currently replicated in developing countries...

Jessie Harney

PhD Candidate
Goldman School of Public Policy

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

PhD Candidate
Political Science

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

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...

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.