In the spirit of creating community spaces of self-determination, Natalia is a member of the Chicanx World Making and Futurities project, a do-it-yourself rasquache multi-media and popular education collective. Additionally, she serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal.

Drawing on courtroom observation, archival analysis, and in-depth interviews with legal actors, defendants, program staff, and advocates, the dissertation traces how alternatives to incarceration, intervention mandates, and discretionary plea negotiations shape the everyday meaning of accountability in these cases. Situating domestic violence courts alongside the parallel architecture of drug and mental health courts, Aarushi examines the uneven fit between intimate partner violence and the rehabilitative and problem-solving frameworks increasingly adopted across the criminal legal system. Her work engages scholarship on street-level bureaucracy, legal social construction, therapeutic jurisprudence, and feminist theories of visibility, interpretation, and evidence.

Aarushi is particularly interested in ethnography as a method for examining how institutional practices reproduce social inequalities through ordinary bureaucratic routines and discretionary decision-making. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF GRFP), the National Institutes of Health (T32 in Gender, Sexuality and Health), and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Before beginning her doctoral work, she received her BA in Social Anthropology and Global Health from Harvard College.

Sergio Saravia (he/him) is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Sociology at Syracuse University. His dissertation, “Union-led Workers’ Political Education and Labor Movement Union Revitalization in the US,” examines why union-led workers’ education has faded from serious debates about labor union revitalization and how strategies to revitalize the labor movement have weakened workers’ political education programs. It seeks to contribute to debates on union revitalization by highlighting the often-overlooked role of labor and union-led workers’ education. It also considers how the production and dissemination of ideas help workers make sense of the labor movement’s present crises, given that unions are sites of critical adult education, knowledge production, and grassroots discussions about resistance and the reshaping of society from the ground up.

Sergio holds a bachelor’s degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and a master’s degree in Labor and Global Workers’ Rights from the Pennsylvania State University.

Kieren is also a co-founder of the Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective (CPISC), a growing network of scholar-activists who conduct interdisciplinary applied research, mentor students, and support the equitable study of the Pacific. Outside of UC Berkeley, they serve as an instructor at Mount Tamalpais College in San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where they teach Ethnic Studies, emphasizing environmental justice activism and systemic racism in urban planning. They have an MESc from Yale University and a BS from Johns Hopkins University.

In addition to studying the NUH, she is an active participant in the group’s 21st century revival — as both a historian and an organizer. Told from Los Angeles, where Annie organizes housed and unhoused people together on the neighborhood level, her dissertation aims to arm poor communities in struggle with the weapon of their own history.

Her dissertation, Legal Consciousness and the Side Effects of Abortion Bans: Genetic Counselors’ Perspectives on Navigating Abortion Law in the Post-Dobbs Era, investigates how abortion restrictions reshape prenatal care through the everyday work of genetic counselors. Drawing on in-depth interviews, she explores how counselors interpret abortion law and how these interpretations shape clinical decision-making, professional relationships, and patient care. By centering providers’ interpretive work, the study shows how law is enacted in practice and its implications for equity,  access, and health care workforce sustainability.

Her research has been supported by the Society of Family Planning, the UCSF Newcomer Health Policy Scholarship, and the UCSF Strauss Dissertation Scholarship. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

As a first-generation Latina sociologist with prior juvenile justice involvement, Jaqueline is dedicated to mentoring system-impacted youth. During her fieldwork, she served as a college instructor, tutor, and mentor to incarcerated youth in a Southern California juvenile detention facility.

Jaqueline’s research has received support from the National Science Foundation, along with UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Fellowship and the UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship. She holds an M.A. from UC Berkeley and a B.A. from UC Santa Barbara.

Drawing on multiple methods, her dissertation explores how Black farmers understand the cultural, political, and spiritual significance of farming. “Black Soil and Soul” uplifts the worldviews, values, and practices that inform how North Carolinian Black farmers combat food apartheid and the ongoing decline of Black farmland. Specifically, she calls attention to the ways that religion, spirituality, and the need for healing continue to shape the way that Black farmers relate to their land and their communities. This research has been supported by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Wilson Library, Swearer Center for Public Service, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

Raquel is passionate about reconnecting communities who have been intentionally separated from the land with an intimate connection to the Earth. A budding farmer in her own right, Raquel has spent the last three years collectively growing culturally relevant veggies and medicinal herbs on Black owned-farms in Rhode Island and North Carolina. In these roles, she grew food for communities living under food apartheid and connected dozens of BIPOC folks with limited exposure to farming to the land through workshops, events, and relationship-building. She recently relocated to Durham to manage a new community garden, collaboratively build a community land trust, and teach land-based skills.

She holds a BA in Economics and Africana Studies from Williams College and MA in Sociology from Brown University.

Her dissertation, Building the Square: Protest, Governance, and Abolitionist Safety at George Floyd Square, draws on five years of ethnographic research, fifty-nine interviews, archival materials, and visual analysis to explore how a protest site marking a police muder became civic infrastructure for care, accountability, and public safety outside formal institutions. She demonstrates how residents construct norms and sustain care, transforming public safety into a relational, community-driven achievement.

Her award-winning scholarship appears in Mobilization and Contexts, and her public writing in The Nation. At the University of Minnesota, she is an award-winning instructor recognized for her creative and engaged pedagogy. 

Catherine’s scholarship appears in Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Qualitative Research, and has previously been supported by the Ford Foundation and the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program. She holds a JD from Yale Law School, an MSc from the University of Oxford, and a BA from Columbia University.