Berkeley Journal of Sociology

Janna Huang is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley and an editor for the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. Her dissertation asks: are the operating logics of “sustainable capitalism,” and how do these logics shape corporate governance and diffuse into everyday organizational action around climate change? Her work leverages a mixed-method approach, consisting of in-depth interviewing and quantitative analysis, to systematically conceptualize how elite players primarily responsible for climate crisis are deploying technological and governance strategies to shape our collective climate futures. Janna holds a B.S. in Computer Science with interdisciplinary honors in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) from Stanford University.

Research Interests: Science and Technology Studies, Knowledge, Economic Sociology, Environmental Sociology

Prashasti Bhatnagar, Esq., M.P.H. (she/her) is a public health attorney, a Ph.D. student and Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow at UCLA, and a Board Director for the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund. Her work is focused on exploring and implementing community-led interventions rooted in health justice, carceral & border abolition, and liberation. Born and raised in New Delhi, India, Prashasti received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center; M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, as a Sommer Scholar, with a Certificate in Health Disparities and Health Inequalities; and B.S. in Sociology, summa cum laude from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia.

Research Interests: Immigration; Health justice; Sociology of law; Abolition

Summer Lopez Colorado is a sixth year doctoral candidate, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, educator, and artist studying in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Their work primarily centers analyses of gendered-racialization of women of color in the U.S., examining the reproduction of overlapping forms of structural domination and strategies of resistance. Summer’s dissertation project utilizes critical qualitative journey mapping to explore mobility, gender ethnic identity, and kinship-building among Latinas with bachelor’s degrees. Her previous work examining disability and sex workers’ experiences with the carceral system is to be featured in the book Sex Work Today published by NYU Press (forthcoming November 2024). In the Los Angeles community, she is an organizer and singer for Fired Up: Community Ceasefire Choir and a member of Anti-Capitalism for Artists. She holds a B.A. in sociology, cum laude from Cornell University.

Research Interests: Race, Gender, and Class; Inequality/Mobility; Education; Disability in Society

Cathy Hu is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work sits at the intersection of punishment and society, social movements, and political sociology. Currently, she is working on an ethnographic and interview project examining criminal justice activism in the Bay Area. The project focuses on the county criminal court as a new site of intervention for social movements from across the political spectrum. Before starting at Berkeley, Cathy worked as a research analyst at the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center and received a BA in Sociology from Rice University.

Research Interests: Carceral state; Social movements; Racial politics; Law and society

Jessica Law is a PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. She broadly studies issues related to racial formation, the state, identity politics, and social movements. Her dissertation project explores the institutionalization of racial categories, its political consequences, and the possibilities for radical change. She holds a master’s degree in sociology from UC Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and race studies from the University of Chicago.

Research Interests: Race and ethnicity; Politics; Knowledge

Andy Carr is a fifth-year Ph.D. student researching American law and politics at the New School for Social Research and an adjunct instructor in Fordham University’s Political Science department. Previously, he was a Moscone Scholar and Dean’s Research Fellow at U.C. Law, San Francisco (Hastings), where he received his JD in 2019. His research largely focuses on constitutional and administrative law, including topics like free expression under the First Amendment, democratic accountability in the bureaucracy, and public–private coordination in the housing and finance sectors. He also holds a BA in Government from Christopher Newport University and a MA in Political Science from Penn State.

Research Interests: Constitutional law; Bureaucratic decision-making; Law and Political Economy

See Pok Loa is a D.Phil. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Oxford, where he is a John Swire Scholar based at St. Antony’s College. He studies the cultural dimension of the transformation of work and technology. Through a cross-national comparative lens, his dissertation project studies how self-employed professionals in the high-skill platform economy understand the cultural ideals of ‘work’, how they confront precarity, and why these mechanisms differ by national contexts. His research site is global, covering China, Japan, and the UK. He has published research in The Sociological Review, American Behavioral Scientist, and Asian Population Studies. Prior to graduate school, he worked in tech startup companies.

Research Interests: Sociology of Work; Time and Temporality; Emotion; Science and Technology Studies; Inequality; Comparative Ethnography

Vidyasagar Sharma is a second-year PhD student in Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is currently part of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Project “Navigating Universities: Student Aspirations, Boundaries and Transformations in India and the Philippines”. He worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delhi until March 2023. He holds a master’s in Political Science from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an M.Phil in Political Science from the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. He has been associated as an Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, and worked as a Research Intern at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. His doctoral research focuses on studying non-traditional students’ aspirations and social lives at Indian universities. Currently, he is doing ethnographic fieldwork at Delhi University, India.

Research Interests: Belonging; Higher Education; Social Justice; Anti-Caste Pedagogy; Spatial identity; Urban Marginality; Ethnography

Barbara Zagorc is a PhD Candidate in Sociology of Culture at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, and a Research Assistant at the American Slovenian Education Foundation. Her dissertation delves into the intricate power dynamics shaping contemporary urban spaces, with a particular focus on the case study of People’s Park in Berkeley. Barbara’s research interests span a broad spectrum, including the intersection of society and space, power dynamics within space production, public engagement in urban planning, the emergence of resistance and alternative spaces, homelessness, the criminalization of space, knowledge production and media, youth studies, and migration patterns. Her passion for urban issues developed during her life experiences and visits to the United States.

Research Interests: Urban Sociology; Social Movements; Law and Society, Knowledge Production and Media; Political Sociology

Taniya Chakrabarty has recently submitted her Ph.D. dissertation titled, “Hiring as a Social Process: A Study of Campus Placements in Select Educational Institutions” in Sociology from the Centre for Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She has previously completed her M.Phil. in Sociology from CSSS, JNU, and Masters in Globalisation and Labour from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). She has also worked as a researcher in several social science projects covering a diverse range of topics like prison labour, labour market inequality, hiring inequalities, among others.

Research Interests: Elite sociology; Sociology of education; Social stratification; Sociology of business; Public policy

Mehdi Hoseini is a PhD student in the sociology department at Boston College. He holds an MA in sociology and currently, as a part of his PhD, is doing a project on British colonialism in Egypt. Also, he has done some work on social movements and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. Besides the PhD program, he is a recipient of a fellowship for the 2024-2025 year at The Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.

Research Interests: Global & Transnational Sociology; Historical Sociology; Political Sociology; Postcolonial Studies

Enrique Núñez-Mussa is a Fulbright scholar and a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Information and Media program at the School of Journalism of Michigan State University. He is an external graduate affiliate with the Center for Latinx Digital Media of Northwestern University and the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life of UNC Chapel Hill. His research interests include journalism’s epistemology, societal function, and legitimacy. Before attending Michigan State University, he was a full-time faculty member at the School of Communications of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). He holds an MA in Journalism, Media, and Globalization at Aarhus University with a joint degree in Journalism and Media Across Cultures at Hamburg University. His BA is in Social Communication, with a Major in Journalism and a Minor in Literature from PUC.

Research Interests: Journalism Studies; Media Sociology; Field Theory; Epistemology; Mixed Methods; Historical Methods; Visual Communication

Xin Fan is a second-year PhD student at School of Education, Durham University in the UK. My PhD project focuses on how rural Chinese parents make school choice for their children after the small-size village schools shut down due to school consolidation policy. I am currently doing my fieldwork in rural China and enjoying spending time with and learning from my participants. Aside from writing and doing research, I love photography and a walk with my loved ones in the nature.

Research Interests: Rural education; Educational equity; Parenting styles and socioeconomc status; Ethnography; Bourdieu

Julio Montanez, MA, is a second year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Central Florida (UCF). Julio’s research is located at the intersection of domestic/family/intimate partner violence, social inequalities, and public policy. His first scholarly co-authored book is entitled, Between Systems and Violence: State-Level Policy Targeting Intimate Partner Violence in Immigrant and Refugee Lives. His works can also be found in Crime & Delinquency, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Springer Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence, and Violence Against Women. One of Julio’s favorite academic experiences was teaching a course entitled “Patterns of Domestic Violence in Society” at UCF in Summer 2023.

Research Interests: Domestic Violence; Social Inequalities; Law; Mixed Methods; Applied Sociology

Felipe Antonio Honorato is a PhD candidate in the Social Change and Political Participation Post-Graduation Programme of the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, under the supervision of professor Valéria Barbosa de Magalhães. He was a visiting PhD researcher in the Faculty of Social Sciences of KU Leuven, Belgium, between 2023 and 2024, under the supervision of professor Katrien Pype.

Research Interests: Congolese migrations; History of DR Congo; Belgian colonialism; International migrations.