Graduate Student Grant Recipients

Amy Reid

Project: Grandmother’s Garden

Amy Reid’s work examines the intersections between gender, national identity, and labor, collaborating with communities such as female truckers and domestic workers to reimagine what work is through the film form. Part of her dissertation work is a feature-length 16mm video experimental film looking at women, quilting, and 19th and 20th-century US reproductive labor history. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Film and Digital Media Department.

Micah Card

Project: Private to Public Shifts In Work-Family Policy: The Implications for Childcare Provision & The Labor Context of Early Care and Education Worker

Micah Card (she/they) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their work focuses on the workforce and political economy of early childhood care and education (ECE), and their dissertation research centers on the lived experiences and professional agency of California early childhood educators amid the state’s rapidly changing Universal Pre-Kindergarten policy rollout.

Mirella Deniz-Zaragoza

Project: Farmworker Justice: Pesticide Exposure, Health, and Grassroots Organizing in the Eastern Coachella Valley

Mirella Deniz-Zaragoza is the daughter of immigrant and farmworking parents in the Eastern Coachella Valley, and a community-based researcher who examines the intersections of labor, immigration, environmental justice, race/ethnicity, gender, rurality, farmworker health, and worker organizing. Mirella is studying the experiences of pesticide exposure and its impacts on Latinx farmworkers’ health and that of their families in the Eastern Coachella Valley.

Rolly Kapoor

Project: Together to Work? Role of Travel Buddies on Women Employment and Mobility

Rolly is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on issues related to gender, access and urban mobility in developing countries. For her dissertation, she explores practical ways to work around and lessen the impact of existing social norms against women’s physical mobility and employment. She currently have ongoing field projects in India. She received a BA Honors in Economics from Delhi University and MSc in Economics from University College London (UCL).

Rosa Navarro

Project: Race, Labor, and H2A Workers: Racial and Spatial Segregation of Indigenous Farmworkers in the Pacific Northwest

Rosa Navarro is a first-generation college student, proud daughter, and granddaughter of Mexican Farmworkers from Michoacan, Mexico. She is a fourth-year Ph.D. Student, and her dissertation project is looking at the fast-growing H-2A Guestworker Program in the Pacific Northwest and its impacts on local farmworker communities.

Summer Sullivan

Project: Leafy Greens and Digital Dreams: California Agriculture, Racial Capitalist Landscapes, and the Future of (Farm) Work

Summer Sullivan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Studies with a designated emphasis in Sociology. Her dissertation explores the evolving relationships among labor, automation, and ecology in the Salinas Valley agricultural industry.

Robin Jones

Project: Trajectories of independent communist organizing in postcolonial Syria

Robin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Consciousness Department whose research focuses on movements and parties of the independent left-wing opposition in Syria during the 1970s and 1980s. Through oral history and archival work, he examines these movements’ specific interventions in the context of the Cold War and the global New Left, the trajectories of their activists and intellectuals amid authoritarian repression and neoliberal ascendancy, and the continued resonance of their political projects in relation to the Arab uprisings and ensuing Syrian war.

Carrie Hamilton

Project: Going Green? Historicizing Enviro-Labor Relations in the US Energy Transition

Carrie Hamilton is a Ph.D. Student in Sociology. She investigates labor in the US energy transition, with a focus on the shifting geographies of labor and environmental organizing that emerge around electric vehicle supply chain onshoring to the US.

Veronica Hamilton

Project: Objectification of Starbucks Workers and Pathways to Humanization

Veronica Hamilton is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Psychology and studies objectification of low-wage workers. Her doctoral work focuses on how unionization at Starbucks can address dehumanizing working conditions.

Arlo Fosburg

Project: The Violence of Improvement: Colonial Contours of Scientific Agriculture

Arlo Fosburg (they/them) is a sixth year Ph.D. Candidate in Feminist Studies with a designated emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Their work critically historicizes the land-grant college system by examining the structures of settler colonial dispossession, anti-Blackness, racialized labor, and patriarchy that undergird this supposed “democratic experiment.

Riley Collins

Project: Teacher Resistance in Times of Social Reproduction Crisis

Riley Collins is a doctoral student in the Education department whose work bridges the study of historical and contemporary teacher labor movements. Prior to entering the doctoral program, Riley taught as a dual language Math high school teacher in Louisiana.