Summer Fellowship

Tera Johnson (she/her) is a dual degree Master’s student in City Planning and Landscape Architecture. Using her background as an artist and environmental scientist, Tera seeks to amplify the strengths of people of color, while advocating for healthy and just connections between social and ecological systems. Tera is also co-founder of Two Photon, which uses art to communicate science, raise money and awareness about social issues, and support fellow minorities interested in STEM.

Rahma R. Mahdi is set to graduate in Fall 2021 as a Regent’s and Chancellor’s Scholar from the University of California, Berkeley, where she majors in Interdisciplinary Studies with minors in Public Policy and Education. As a student researcher, Rahma aims to better situate computer science within the realm of global education and policy, with a specialized emphasis on developing countries in the East African region.

Sabrina Ali Jamal-Eddine (she/her/hers) is an Arab disabled Spoken Word Poet, Registered Nurse, and University Fellow currently pursuing her PhD in Nursing with a focus on Disability Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Sabrina’s research focuses on the use of Spoken Word Poetry as an innovative form of critical narrative pedagogy to educate healthcare students, instructors, and practitioners about identity-based oppression and the consequential identity-based health inequities with a focus on ableism and disability justice.

Yehya Abuzaid is a 2021 graduate from UC Berkeley's Global Studies program. There he pursued an undergraduate honors thesis where he analyzed the motivations, strategies, and consequences of foreign intervention in the country of Yemen. Prior to his thesis, Yehya worked with the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission and the Police Review Commission to research transparency mechanisms for the Berkeley police department and improve civilian oversight.

Sophie Brion Neely is a justice-centered playwright, researcher, and educator who recently earned her degree in Ethnicity, Race, & Migration from Yale University. As an undergraduate, she served as the editor-in-chief of the Elm City Echo, an advocacy-oriented literary magazine that develops the work of unhoused community members, and worked as a residential counselor for Professor Allyson Hobbs’s course, “Racial Identity in the American Imagination,” at the Stanford Humanities Institute.

The daughter of Bangladeshi-Muslim immigrants, Lamisa Mustafa is a recent honors graduate of Southern Methodist University (SMU), where she received bachelor’s degrees in Human Rights, Sociology, and Public Policy. Serving with the SMU Human Rights Program, Lamisa created opportunities for students to advance human rights awareness and activism on campus, in North Texas, and across the United States.

Kendall Stephenson is a labor organizer, first year PhD student-worker in the Economics department at Colorado State University, and a Research Assistant at the Regional Economic Development Institute (REDI). Kendall is interested in how structural changes in the economy necessitate varying degrees of government responses, particularly at the state and local level, and how these responses affect economic and social wellbeing. For that reason, his primary research interests relate to labor market policy and public finance.

Katerine Perez (she/hers) is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Sociology. Her love for Sociology and research stems from her personal experiences as a first-generation student and woman of color. These identities motivated her to complete a Senior Honors Thesis, which investigates Latinx identity formation and boundary work at highly-selective universities.

Jordan Brown (she/her or he/him) is a student, poet, writer, and community organizer from Georgia who has made a new home in Washington, DC. Through her academic and activist work, Jordan advocates for disability justice and focuses on making activist spaces more accessible, inclusive, and community-oriented. She is also an apprentice restorative justice practitioner and has extensive experience facilitating workshops around various issues of identity and social justice.

Irene Franco Rubio is an holistic activist, writer, and organizer based in Phoenix, Arizona. A young Latinx woman of Guatemalan and Mexican descent, Irene is rooted in community and devoted to the movements for social, racial, and environmental justice. Irene is committed to advocating for BIPOC communities through intersectional movement building, digital community organizing, and writing to uplift historically underrepresented stories and voices.

Camille Braswell is a rising undergraduate senior at Loyola University Chicago where she majors in both Environmental Studies and Economics. Her educational pursuits have revolved around public policy research focusing on the intersection of environmental issues and racial inequalities born out of historical policymaking. She has a particular interest in residential segregation and how it exacerbates and reinforces environmental injustices.

Aaron Kinard is a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Education Studies and History. During his time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Aaron’s research examined the racialized experiences of Black students in rural, predominantly white high schools.

Elliot Smith recently graduated from The Univeristy of Iowa, where he received a B.A. in public health and sociology, a certificate in social science analytics, and a minor in Chinese. Elliot is interested in public health work which addresses the intersectional social justice needs of communities suffering health disparities. As an undergraduate, Elliot's research confronted social determinants of health and the sociology of public health inequalities.

Sabrina Shih is a rising junior at Columbia University studying computer science and human rights. She is passionate about how the solutions to global existential risks are also opportunities for transformative social change through the inclusion and empowerment of marginalized communities. As a coordinator in her university’s hub of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led, grassroots movement for climate justice and a just transition, Sabrina is committed to building a diverse movement for collective liberation.

María Rojas is a Chilean Ph.D. candidate from the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. In Chile, she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism. She became interested in specializing in education after working for two years as a Spanish teacher in a marginalized high school in Santiago. After that experience, she came to the US with a Fulbright scholarship to pursue her masters’ degree in Education Policy at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Erfan Moradi is a graduate of the History and Geography departments at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in labor and urban histories. His thesis follows the proliferation of container shipping in San Francisco Bay Area ports and its concomitant transformations to the urban social fabric. His study centers the voices of worker-artists to explore grief over the disappearance of working-class social spaces. His ongoing research involves developing an archival collection of media from waterfront writers and artists for the Bancroft Library.