Current Graduate Students

Click on the names below to read about each of the current graduate students in the Ethnic Studies Department at UCSD

Cristal Alba

Email: cgalba@ucsd.edu

Education: University of California, Los Angeles, BA Chicana/Chicano Studies

Research Interests: Pornography and queer Latinx identity.

Josh Bender

Email: j2bender@ucsd.edu

Education: BA English and American Literature, NYU; MA Southeast Asian Studies, U of Washington

Research Interests: Literature and Filipinx folk cultures

Antonio Catrileo

Email: acatrileo@ucsd.edu

Education: Pontifica Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, BA and MA

Research: Mapuche Two-Spirit communities and histories

Andrea Gaspar

Email: adgaspar@ucsd.edu

Education: BA University of California, Irvine

Research Interests: I am interested in looking at how they generate community power and accountability through storytelling, healing intergenerational trauma, and by establishing formal and informal networks of political education.

Research: In my project, I aim to compare the connections and differences on how Mixteco, Payómkawichum, and Kumiai people resist under a colonial, heteronormative, militant, capitalistic, and anti-Black regime.

Gregory Seiichi Pōmaikaʻi (Pōmaikaʻi) Gushiken

Email: ggushike@ucsd.edu

Education: BA in English and Political Science, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2018

Research Interests: Settler Colonialism and Militarism in the Pacific, Gender & Sexuality, the Environmental Humanities, Climate Justice, Pacific Studies, Indigenous Politics, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, Aloha ʻĀina, Hawaiian Diaspora, Queer Indigenous Studies, Community-based Participatory Research, contemporary Hawaiian literature, Hawaiian Language archives, and oral history.

Oscar Gutierrez

Email: ogutierr@ucsd.edu

Education:
B.A. in Journalism and Race and Resistance Studies, San Francisco State University (2017)

Research Interests:
Environmental Justice, Latinx Studies, Critical Geography, Land and Memory, Working-class Epistemologies, Industrial Labor, Political Activism and Social Movements, (Southeast) Los Angeles, Gender and Migration, Queer Studies, Settler Colonialism, Community-based Participatory Research, and Grassroots Intergenerational Organizing.

Tirrezz Hudson

Email: thudson@ucsd.edu

Education: North Carolina State University, BA

Research: Black masculinities and sexualities; Black spiritualities

Cheron Laughing

Email: claughin@ucsd.edu

Education: BA Dartmouth College; MA University of Arizona

Research Interests: Recruiting and supporting students of color, low income, and DACA students to participate in study abroad programs that center around activities that highlight the legacies of American imperialism, and interact with local communities to think about bridging decolonization processes in distinctive sites impacted by US empire.

Stephanie Martinez

Email: symartin@ucsd.edu

Education: B.A. in Sociology and Chicanx Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; M.A. Chicanx and Latinx Studies CSU, Los Angeles

Research Interests: Critical Geography, Women of Color Feminisms, Environmental Humanities, Speculative Futures Studies, Queer Latinx Studies, Labor, Working Class Epistemologies, and formations of U.S. Empire.

Radhika Marwaha

Email: rmarwaha@ucsd.edu

Education: BS Global Disease Biology, UC Davis

Research Interests: Caste, extractive industries, petro-culture

Rochelle McFee

Email: rmcfee@ucsd.edu

Gus Meuschke

Email: gmeuschk@ucsd.edu

Education: BA Vassar College; MA University of Arizona

Research Interests: My research interests broadly include queer of color critique, Indigenous studies, comparative ethnic studies, visual archival research, museum studies, and performance studies. In my doctoral research, I want to investigate the possibility of queer multiracial social formations and shared ways of being that do not have foundations in anti-Blackness and settler colonialism, which I will locate in speculative visual archives, art, and performance.

Naaila Mohammed

Email: namohamm@ucsd.edu

Amira Noeuv

Email: amnoeuv@ucsd.edu

India Pierce

Email: ipierce@ucsd.edu

Education: Ohio University, B.A. Women and Gender Studies; The Ohio State University, M.A. African and African American Studies

Areas of Interests : Visual Ethnography, Performance Studies, Feminist Pedagogy, Gender and Sexuality, Religion, Black Radicalism, Embodiment epistemology, Speculative Imaginaries and Methodologies, Social Movements, Popular Culture, and Queer theory.

Research: My work investigates the expansive spiritual freedom that is opened up when thinking about the past/present/future of queer divine embodiment. Central to that exploration is my question of how queer women of color activists queer notions of salvation in order to create alternative pathways to the divine. Ultimately, illuminating how those practices can be read as not only acts of self-love that demand a different type of engagement with the world around them, but also as a practice of freedom that impacts their work as organizers and activists.

Daniel Rios

Email: darios@ucsd.edu

B. Pricila Rodriguez

Email: brr022@ucsd.edu

Education: B.A. in Gender and Women Studies and B.A. in Anthropology at the University of Arizona

Research Interests: Race, space, and punishment; connections between the spaces of prisons, immigrant detention centers, reservations, ghettos, and borders

Isaias Rogel

Email: irogel@ucsd.edu

Pronouns: They/them

Education: New Mexico State University, MA, Creative Writing; Northeastern Illinois University, BA, English/Creative Writing

Liliana Sampedro

Email: lsampedr@ucsd.edu

Noelle Sepina

Email: nsepina@ucsd.edu

Bettina Serna

Email: bserna@ucsd.edu

Education: California State University, San Marcos, BA and MA

Research: Latinx communities, economy and incarceration related to cannabis

Victoria Siaumau

Victoria Siamau

Email: vsiaumau@ucsd.edu

Education: BA Child Development and Ethnic Studies, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

Research Interests: Critical race, feminist, queer and decolonial science and technology studies

Sierra Sims

Email: ssims@ucsd.edu

Education: BA Southern Oregon University

Research Interests: I am interested in furthering my study in Native American Studies through the vein of violence against Native women, girls and 2Spirit peoples in Oregon. In order to do so, I aim to follow and support Oregon House Bill 2625, which is undergoing its year long trial, where the state police department will be working with Native Nations to create a database for accurate statistics.

Citlally Solorzano

Email: csolorzano@ucsd.edu

Education: BA Chicanx/a/o Studies, Cal State Fullerton

Research Interests: Decolonial form of expression in BIPOC popular culture

Sara Sparks

Email: sjsparks@ucsd.edu

Education: Combined BS/BA in Agribusiness and Comparative Ethnic Studies, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; MA Higher Education and Student Affairs, Boston College

Research Interests: Black and Indigenous relationships to food and land

Phuc To

Email: pdto@ucsd.edu

Education: BA Biological Sciences & MA Asian American Studies, UC Irvine

Research Interests: For my dissertation research, I want to interrogate ways in which the rise of NPIC has compromised Black-Asian solidarity and Asian American radicalism and activism since the late 1970s.

Jael Vizcarra

Email: jvizcarr@ucsd.edu

Research: Jael Vizcarra is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Her dissertation is entitled, "En Búsqueda de Posada: Military Rule and the Laotian Resettlement Program in Misiones, Argentina." Jael’s dissertation historicizes the 1979 Southeast Asian refugee resettlement program in Argentina and analyzes the incorporation of Laotian refugees into the Argentine labor force during and after the Argentine military dictatorship. Her research highlights the political origins of displacement and humanitarianism in South America and their relation to U.S. imperialist projects. Jael analyzes the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in various Argentine provinces to understand how refugees contest their ascribed role as objects of compassion and intervention.

Jael's scholarship is informed by comparative racial formation theories, Asian-American Studies, and Critical Refugee and Immigration Studies. Her research gestures towards a transnational reading of the US-centric and universalizing category of "Asian-American" by elucidating the geopolitical implications of South American racial formations that produce Asians beyond US-based racial logics and categories.

Her work has appeared in Amerasia and the popular historiography blog Tropics of Meta.

Racquel West

Email: rawest@ucsd.edu

Education: BA Geography and History, U of Washington

Research Interests: Museum studies and speculative theory

Muhammad Yousuf

Email: syousuf@ucsd.edu

Education: B.A. in Philosophy, Political Science, Gender and Women Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017

Research interests: historical and narrative depictions of martyrdom; ideas of the self, the soul, and liberation in critical theory and decolonial thought; gender and resistance; critical Muslim studies

Christie Yamasaki

Email: chyamasaki@ucsd.edu

Pronouns: She/her

Education: University of California Los Angeles, MA, Asian American Studies; University of California Los Angeles, BA, Economics

Learn more about the Ethnic Studies Ph.D. Alumni.