2026-27 GDC Fellows
Adriana Gabrielle Gonzales
Project Title: “After the Storm: Struggles for Anti-Colonial Democracy, Agrarian Resurgence, and Socioecological Survival under Conditions of Climate Coloniality”
Department: Geography
Emily Fjaellen Thompson
Project Title: “Dis/appearing Images: Visual Memory and Self-Determination in Post-Conflict Peru”
Department: Anthropology
Emily Fjaellen Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology. Her research examines collective memory, Indigenous sovereignty, and the politics of visibility in the aftermath of Peru’s internal armed conflict. Working with photographers and their families in Ayacucho, the war’s epicenter, her dissertation develops a framework for understanding how communities maintain sovereignty over their own histories when transparency itself becomes dangerous. Drawing on longterm ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative archival methods, her work argues that strategic withholding, the deliberate and collective refusal to make images visible, is not a failure of documentation but a powerful form of political agency. Her broader research engages debates in transitional justice, visual anthropology, Latin American studies, and the ethics of collaborative research in contexts of ongoing state violence.
Irene Franco Rubio
Project Title: “Coalition, Care, and Migrant Justice: Organizing Against Detention in Arizona”
Department: Ethnic Studies
Irene Franco Rubio is a PhD student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is a scholar-activist and organizer from Phoenix, Arizona, whose research examines immigrant detention within the broader U.S. carceral state, with a focus on multiracial coalition-building and abolitionist organizing in the U.S. Southwest. Drawing on participatory and community-engaged methods, her work explores how communities impacted by criminalization and migration regimes build alternative systems of care and solidarity.
Jimena Natalia Perez
Project Title: “Restoring the Los Angeles River”
Department: Geography
Jimena Perez is a Geography PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation positions the Los Angeles River as a site of ecological restoration and urban future-making. Through community-engaged ethnographic research, she investigates how diverse stakeholders navigate the challenges and possibilities of repair. Rooted in scholarly inquiry and lived experience, her project centers the voices of those whose place-based relationships and everyday labor inspire more just and reparative futures for human and nonhuman life.
Ooha Uppalapati
Project Title: “Smallholding “partners” in large greenfield urbanization in rural India: a new terrain of democratic politics beyond the metropolis”
Department: City and Regional Planning, College of Environmental Design
Ooha Uppalapati is a PhD candidate in City and Regional Planning at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Ooha’s work engages questions about the politics of planned development in postcolonial democracies. For my dissertation research, I am examining how smallholding farmers navigate and make claims to large scale state-led urban development projects that are planned on expansive agricultural lands in rural India. I am particularly interested in farmers’ collective actions under a recent shift in land acquisition practices that positions rural smallholders as individual “investors” in the development process rather than as affected populations of eminent domain takings. I conduct my analysis using ethnographic methods including long interviews with farmers and observation of proceedings in local level spaces for democratic participation like village councils (grama sabhas) and popular assemblies. I locate my research at the intersection of three political economic shifts that are critical in shaping democratic politics in India today: a new recombinant developmentalism undertaken by the national and regional states, the rise of authoritarian populism in response to the crisis of neoliberalism, and a widespread transition out of agricultural lands and livelihoods.
Sakina Dhorajiwala
Project Title: “How do Citizens Make Claims on the State? : Welfare, Architecture, Digitization, and the Strategies of Claim-Making”
Department: Political Science
Sakina Dhorajiwala is PhD student in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in studying changing citizen state relationships with the proliferation of technology in welfare service delivery in South Asia. She holds a Masters in International Development Policy from Duke University, a Masters in Public Policy & a Bachelors in Economics from University of Mumbai. Previously she has worked as a researcher with LibTech India, an organization focused on improving public service delivery, in collaboration with several people’s movements and campaigns in India.
Sarah Merchant
Project Title: “The New Muslim Left: Islamic Theology and Contemporary Political Organizing in New York City”
Department: Sociology
Sarah Merchant is a PhD candidate in sociology broadly interested in the formations of racial capitalism, the secular, and the racialization of the Muslim subject. Her dissertation explores formations of a progressive political Islam both through an engagement with twentieth century Islamic Marxist political thought and contemporary Muslim American organizing. Drawing on her experiences as a participant within Muslim political spaces in New York City, she is documenting how the Muslim Left is not only re-shaping progressive organizing practices but is also articulating its own vision of Islamic political thought.
Zhehang Zhang
Project Title: “Zones of Illegibility: Capital Flows, Transnational Labor, and Development in Global China”
Department: Sociology
Zhehang Zhang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines Global China, borderland development, state power, and the political economy of transnational capitalism through qualitative and comparative methods. His current work focuses on how Chinese-led industrial development reshapes cross-border governance, institutional experimentation, and social life in China–Southeast Asia borderlands. He holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Peking University. The GDC Fellowship supports research for his project, “Zones of Illegibility: Capital Flows, Transnational Labor, and Development in Global China.”