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...

Emily Martin

2025-2026 BELS Fellow

Emily Martin is a PhD candidate in the University of California, Berkeley’s History department. She is currently working on a dissertation studying the relationship between diet and racial susceptibility to disease in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. Her dissertation broadly outlines how medical and legal public health frameworks make use of radicalized cultural practices like diet to rationalize and exercise control over marginalized communities. Prior to starting her doctoral work, she received her Bachelor’s in History and...

Emily Reich

2025-2026 BELS Fellow

Emily Reich (she/her) is a third-year doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in UC Berkeley's School of Education. Her current research agenda investigates the expansion of Israeli curriculum into East Jerusalem. More broadly, she is interested in using qualitative methodologies to capture how education policies unfold in practice. Her additional research projects include studying California schools' utilization of COVID-19 relief funding and examining community mobilization around the implementation of CA's ethnic studies curriculum...

Eva Vaillancourt

Eva Vaillancourt is a historian working at the intersection of law, technology, science, and social life, with a special interest in policing. Her current project explores problems of normativity through the history of modern road traffic rules: red lights, stop signs, speed limits, pavement markings, pedestrian crosswalks, and all the other criminally enforceable instructions we obey (and disobey) every time we step into the street. Tentatively titled Red Light, Green Light: Traffic and the Twilight of Imperial Liberalism, 1870-1950,...

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 (she/her/hers) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Political Economy.

Her ongoing dissertation research explores the public participation processes in development of wind energy infrastructure in rural US, with an emphasis on regions in transition from fossil fuel based economies. For this work, she zooms in on stakeholders and their various claims around energy projects and the role of sub-national governments in constraining, shaping and representing economic and environmental interests of communities.

In...