The UCSC Center for Labor and Community (CLC) is a dynamic new hub for high-impact research and policy advocacy on issues related to the world of work in the Central Coast region of California and beyond. The CLC will award research grants of up to $7,500 for UCSC graduate students working on innovative, original research projects focused on labor rights, labor subjectivities, labor markets, labor movements, and/or labor-community coalitions and organizing, in domestic, international or comparative contexts. Proposals that are interdisciplinary, collaborative, and/or involve community-engaged research methods will be especially welcomed. Students who have not received the grant in the past will be prioritized.
Funds can be used for local, domestic, and international travel, research supplies, and services to facilitate distinct data collection techniques, including archival research, fieldwork, and surveying. The funds should be spent in Summer 2025, but no later than the end of Fall 2025 quarter (Dec 12, 2025).
Selection criteria will include:
- Relevance to the core goals and commitments of the CLC
- Originality of the research contribution
- Strength of rationale
- Clarity of proposed activities
- Appropriateness of project scope and of budget projections
Eligibility
Any graduate student in good academic standing at UC Santa Cruz is eligible to apply.
Requirements
To apply, students must demonstrate that labor is a primary field of their research project and they must be in good academic standing. Students must submit a four-page proposal, a CV, and an itemized budget. Applicants must also arrange for a faculty recommendation (preferably from the students’ dissertation advisor), to be sent directly to the CLC by the application deadline.
Finally, recipients of the grants will complete a post-award survey/report and agree to present their research findings and experience at a CLC research event in Spring of 2026 in the form of a poster or a panel/slideshow presentation.
How to apply
Please prepare the following in PDF form.
- Four-page Proposal (1.5 space, 1-inch margins, 12 pt font – approx. 1,500 words total), including:
- Project abstract (200 words or less)
- Project description, including discussion of:
- research activities, rationale for activities, significance for the field of labor studies and labor movement, and timeline;
- the organizations and/or individuals will be involved (and in what capacities), and their relevant expertise or areas of work;
- intended outcomes of the research;
- the relevance of the project to the goals and commitments of the Center for Labor and Community;
- Note: if the research involves human subjects, applicants are strongly encouraged to obtain IRB approval prior to submission or provide a statement of plan and timeline to secure IRB approval.
- Detailed budget for up to $7,500
- An abbreviated CV of all key personnel, if applicable (please put all CVS together in one PDF document)
Items 1-3 should be submitted by the applicant, using the Grad Student Grant Application Form.
- Faculty letter of recommendation (preferably from your primary advisor) that:
- confirms the graduate student is in good academic standing;
- comments on the feasibility and relevance of the project to the students’ academic training;
- comments on the degree that the proposed project aligns with the Center for Labor and Community’s research areas of interest.
The recommendation letter should be submitted by the faculty member, using the GSR Grant Faculty Recommendation Form.
Reporting
Reporting is due within 30 days of the project end-date. Grant recipients will be required to complete a post-award survey that describes the outcomes of the project, including any deviations from the proposed project, and proposed next steps, and a budget report describing all expenditures.
Acknowledgement
Recipients are expected to acknowledge support from the Center for Labor and Community in any publications or other research products linked to the sponsored research.
Deadline
Completed applications (including the faculty recommendation letter) are due no later than May 1, 2025.
If you have any questions, please contact Vicente Vega, Administrative Research Coordinator of the Center for Labor and Community, at vvega@ucsc.edu.
Graduate student grant recipients
In 2024, the Center for Labor and Community was able to award thirteen research grants for UCSC graduate students working on innovative, original research projects focused on labor rights, labor subjectivities, labor markets, labor movements, and/or labor-community coalitions and organizing, in either a domestic, international or comparative context.
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.
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.
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.