Graduate Students

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Rita Gaber		Personal Interests:
E-mail: rgaber@uclink,berkeley.edu BA 1992 (English Literature) University of Nebraska - Lincoln MTS 1995, Harvard Divinity School Research Interests: Development and health; ecologies of health and disease and the geography of medical care and its accessibility Regional Focus:

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Daniel A. Graham		Websites of Interest: Latin American Network Information Center This website, administered by the University of Texas, is the single-best electronic resource I know of for finding information germane to Latin America. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) In case Fox News Network doesn’t do it for you. xRefer This search engine scours multiple online reference resources to give you definitions to many of those fancy terms you’re afraid to admit you don’t understand. New Utopia How would you like to become a citizen of a tiny island nation modeled after Ayn Rand’s Objectivist paradise, Galt’s Gulch? Social safety net? Fuhgeddaboutit! Human cloning? You got it! Anything goes (for the right price) in Prince Lazarus Long’s New Utopia. Parkway Theater Get the showtimes and the menu for "California’s first speakeasy theater," located in downtown Oakland. Pizza, beer, couches, and second-run movies. Rocky Horror on Saturday nights and lots of special events. I’ll take that over New Utopia any day.
E-mail: grahamd@uclink4.berkeley.edu or olancho1@hotmail.com BA 1994 (Political Science) University of Washington Research Interests: My research has focused on matters relating to politics and identity in rural, eastern Honduras. In 2000, while investigating discourses of violence in Olancho Department, Honduras, I gathered oral accounts of a social bandit named Canuto whom people likened to Robin Hood. Contested narratives about Canuto revealed much about informants’ class position and political affinities. In 2001, I was a participant-observer in a peasant protest against the forceful installation of a hydroelectric project within the buffer zone of Sierra de Agalta National Park. Events surrounding that protest—including the murder of one of the protesters—have piqued my interest in the political dynamics of regional economic integration in Honduras and throughout Central America. At the same time, I am intrigued by municipal-autonomy movements and by articulations within and among indigenous, black, and ladino popular organizations. Regional Focus: Honduras, Central America, Latin America Personal interests: I enjoy outdoor activities, at least in theory. I just bought my first pair of snowshoes and hope to get the chance to make many excursions to the nearby Sierra Nevada for ‘shoeing and cross-country skiing. I am a big fan of bicycle touring, but I totaled my touring bike in spring of 2001 and have had a hard time finding a good replacement for it. I almost never read for pleasure anymore, but if I did, I’d be reading works by the likes of Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, and not R.K. Rowling.

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Jennifer (Jenny) Greenburg		Personal Interests: If I had more time to wander, I would spend it walking around parts of the Bay Area like Lake Merritt, Oakland Chinatown, Delores Park, Redwood Park, and Washington Square. I like to eat nice food, travel, see live music, and learn/use new languages. I also thrive on physical activity: boxing is my newest endeavor.
E-mail: jgreenburg@berkeley.edu BA 2005 (Interdisciplinary Studies) UC Berkeley Research Interests: I am interested in urban history and social transformation in Africa. Most recently, I spent some time in Johannesburg, South Africa looking at how migrants from other parts of Africa are experiencing the housing crisis. I am also interested in how rural-urban migration shapes urban life more broadly and how we might be able to understand conceptions of race and gender as shaped historically through different urban processes. In the past, I have spent time in Cape Town, South Africa researching labor flexibilization in the clothing industry and worked in the nonprofit/philanthropy sector in San Francisco making grants to women's organizations in rural West Africa. Regional Focus: Southern Africa, South Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo, intra-African migration

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Alejandro Guarín		Personal Interests: What I REALLY like to do is sing.
E-mail: aguarin@berkeley.edu BS 1999 (Biology) Universidad Nacional de Colombia MS 2003 (Geography) Penn State Research Interests: I am interested in food: what we eat, where it's produced, who sells it and why. I study how the agro-food system in the Third World has changed over the last 15 years or so in the context of an increasingly liberalized global economy. Specifically, I'm trying to figure out how the rise of big supermarket chains and the persistence of small neighborhood shops in Bogotá have affected the way in which its nearly 8 million people are fed. Regional Focus: Latin America, Colombia

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Catherine Guimond		Personal Interests:
E-mail: Research Interests: Regional Focus:

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Ju Hui Judy Han		Personal Interests: Comix, dog training, melodrama (esp. Korean soap operas), music, gadgets, and FOOD.
E-mail: hanj@berkeley.edu Website: http://www.otherwise.net BA 1995 (English and Women's Studies) UC Berkeley Research Interests: Critical theory, Korean/diaspora studies, transnational feminist/queer/cultural studies, religious fundamentalism, conservatism of all sorts. My dissertation is about contemporary Korean/American evangelical missionary movements across three missionary destinations: China-North Korean border, East Africa (Uganda, Tanzania), and Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan). By tracking missions that originate in South Korea and take place across multiple geographical locations, I examine the theological and sociological currents that stimulate the selection of mission destinations (e.g. "frontier missions," "10/40 Window"), the institutional actors that mobilize transnational missionary networks, and the concrete projects and activities that are carried out on the mission fields. I'm interested in how contemporary Korean/American missionary movements subvert and reinforce existing racial, gender, and geopolitical hierarchies associated with the historical legacy of Christian missions, and how the missions produce and reproduce multiply rendered world imaginaries by engaging in both universalistic and culturally specific sets of commitments. For a 24-hour-comix version of my dissertation, see http://www.otherwise.net/?page_id=279 Regional Focus: Korea, "The World" Also, at the end of the Research Interests, could you add this:

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Jonah Holmes		Personal Interests:
E-mail: jmholmes@berkeley.edu BA 1998 (Philosophy) UC Berkeley Research Interests: transnational linkages between the Middle East and Central Asia; Islamic social movments; post-Soviet transitions Regional Focus: Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus

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Joshua Jelly-Schapiro		Selected Publications: Book Chapter “’Are We All Creoles Now?’: Ethnicity and Nation in a Heterogeneous Caribbean Diaspora (Trinidad)” in Ethnicity, Class and Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra-Caribbean Dimensions, Anton Allahar, ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, May 2005) Articles "Island Mentality" (Op-Ed essay: Cuba after Fidel) The Guardian (UK), March 18, 2008. "MLK for today" (book review essay: King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop by Harvard Sitkoff) San Francisco Chronicle, January 20, 2008 "Borders and Crossers: An Interview with Rebecca Solnit" The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Fall 2007 “Our Dark Places” (book review: Planet of Slums by Mike Davis) Mother Jones, May 5, 2006. “A Voyager Revisited” (book review essay: Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds by Natalie Zemon Davis) Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2006 “Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947” (book review essay) San Francisco Chronicle, February 12, 2006 “The Value(s) of Identity” (book review essay on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity) Tikkun, vol. 20. no. 5 (November-December 2005) “Counterinsurgency, Iraq, and the Salvador War” (movie review essay, Voces Inocentes/Innocent Voices) Mother Jones, October 24, 2005. “A comic genius lost behind his blackface” (book review: Caryl Phillips’ Dancing in the Dark) San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 2005 “Capitalism, God and a Good Cigar: Cuba Enters the 21st Century” (book review essay: Lydia Chavez, ed.) San Francisco Chronicle, July 24, 2005 “Double Down: Notes on the 2004 Election from Reno” The American Prospect, December 3, 2004 “Modernity and Its Outcasts: Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives” (book review essay) Tikkun, vol. 19, no. 4, (July-August 2004)
E-mail: jellyschapiro@berkeley.edu BA 2002 (Literature, and Ethnicity, Race, & Migration) Yale University Research Interests: Most broadly speaking, I am interested in the ways in which human difference is thought about and acted upon in the world. Taking in analyses of literature, music, sport, and politics, my work is guided by the principle that cultural practices and machineries of representation play not merely a reflexive but a constitutive role in social and political life. More specifically, I am interested in how the various processes associated with “globalization” are currently impacting the formation of both cultural identities and political subjectivities. I believe that better understanding the ways in which social and national belonging is mediated through particular conceptions of shared identity is a crucial project today—a project fundamental to the task of building political orders that recognize and celebrate cultural difference yet are based in our deeper commonalities as human beings. My particular geographic area of focus is the Americas, broadly conceived to include the lands and peoples of the entire Western Hemisphere. The Caribbean has thus far served as the especial focus of my work, in part because there the most salient characteristics of the Americas in general are brought into starkest relief: traumatic popular histories of colonialism, genocide, and slavery; migration, cultural mixing, and creolization as basic facts of life for centuries; the location of rooted identity elsewhere for all but a very few native inhabitants; the persistent sense of cosmopolitan possibility and newness inherent to a New World. Though I am now especially interested in approaching these problems in the context of the North American cities, the basic question remains the same: namely, to paraphrase C.L.R. James: what do the extraordinary particulars of cultural and political life in the Americas have to teach us about the whole of human civilization? Regional Focus: The Americas, the Caribbean, Cities

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Leigh Johnson		Websites of interest: realclimate.org http://www.clickpix.de/horses.htm - Guaranteed to make all your problems momentarily melt away! Calogero True-Shape Projection World Map Hurricanes and Global Warming for Inquiring Minds
E-mail: leighjohnson@berkeley.edu BA 2003 (Anthropology) Columbia University Research Interests: My work assesses economic and social responses to climate processes. I am currently examining how financial and governmental institutions are innovatively reconfiguring markets and sovereignty in response to recent environmental change. My specific interests include:  proprietary weather models (especially for tropical cyclones), property insurance, the multiplication of uncertainty and risk, markets in weather and climate-related derivatives, and shifting sovereignty and extractive regimes in the melting Arctic. My older academic projects were: wildfire in the southwestern Amazon - remote sensing, ground-truthing, and participatory community fire prevention; environmental and health indicators for monitoring road-building through the Amazon; property claims, ranching, and gold mining among Amazonian peasant movements. Regional Focus: Southeast & Gulf Coast of the United States; the Arctic; the Amazon

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Shih-Yang Kao		Personal Interests: Back to my hometown in Taiwan, I love going to hot-spring bath with good friends in deep winter times. Here in the Bay Area, I like to take the F line from Berkeley to San Francisco and be astounded by the city skyline on the Bay Bridge. Other than these two, I enjoy hiking, swimming, badminton, suspense movies, trance/house music, and karaoke.
E-mail: shiyangkao@berkeley.edu BA 1999 (Economics) National Taiwan University MA 2004 (Urban Planning) Harvard University Research Interests: Two themes fascinate me and therefore direct my current research. The first is the transformation of urban experience in contemporary East Asian societies. Here I concern how the making and remaking of East Asian cities constitute identities and structure people's sense of selves and others, no matter how intentional or contingent these processes might be. The second theme is the commodification of land-based resources. Following scholarships of political ecology and culture studies, I align myself with the proposition that economic explanations alone do not help us much to comprehend the production and consumption of natural resources; the social lives of resources/commodities are always at the same time historical, cultural, and political. These two general themes have encouraged me to study the urbanization/modernization of Chinese herbal market. The transformation of urban life in contemporary China, which is marked by differentiations of the Chinese body along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity, leads to re-articulations of health, illnesses, and diseases. I am exploring how this development would shape the trajectory of Chinese herbal products. Regional Focus: East Asia, Urban China, and Taiwan

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Kimberley Kinder		Personal Interests:
E-mail: kimkinder@berkeley.edu BA 2004 (Architecture) Carnegie Mellon Masters 2005 (Urban design) Carnegie Mellon MS 2006 (Nature, Society & Environmental Policy ) Oxford University Research Interests: Urban environmental re-creation and contested socio-political hegemony. Regional Focus:

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Sarah Knuth		Personal Interests: I love hiking, swimming, and trail running and so am excited to move from snowy Pennsylvania to California! I am also learning to salsa and tango. My guilty pleasures include watching Project Runway and the IFC.
E-mail: sknuth@berkeley.edu BS 2004 (Earth Sciences) Penn State University MS 2006 (Geography) Penn State University Research Interests: I believe that addressing human-caused climate change in an effective and just way will be one of the most profound challenges of our time. I am particularly interested in how economic globalization is affecting the ways we contribute to climate change and changing the scales at which we may govern greenhouse gas emissions. Regional Focus:

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