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Social Sciences Career Readiness Internships Program

2025-26 GDC Fellows

Franchesca Araújo
Franchesca Araújo is a Ph.D. candidate in African American & African Diaspora Studies. Rooted in Caribbean studies, she writes alongside political theory, disability studies, performance studies, and anti colonial traditions in both poetics and political economy. She is currently writing interdisciplinarily about how deficiency and excess are produced and ascribed onto black cultural productions and spaces as a central part of normative humanness, colonial world craft, state sovereignty/state formation, and resource deprivation—focusing on black dominicanidad (DR) and dominican cultural productions vis a vis the state, imperial power, and ‘latinidad’ at large. In her writing she is committed to affirmations of place rather than nation, and island geographies.

Alejo Garcia is a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. His research lies at the intersection of political ecology, climate and environmental justice, and the uneven geographies of green capitalism. Alejo draws on community-engaged ethnographic methods to understand and support long-standing riverine territorial struggles for agrarian, environmental, and climate justice in the Upper Madgalena River. He is a graduate student affiliate with the Center for Ethnographic Research at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, UC Berkeley.

Annelle Maranan Garcia is a Ph.D student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Broadly, their research examines US imperialism, Filipina/x/o American diasporic activism, and racial formation. Their most recent project analyzed care work and solidarity in anti-imperialist Filipinx community organizing. Annelle holds a BA in Sociology from the University of California, Davis and a MA in Asian American Studies from San Francisco State University.

J’Anna-Mare Lue (she/her) is a Civil and Environmental Engineering PhD candidate with an environmental engineering focus. She is interested in the reparative capacity of engineering in thinking through questions of climate justice in the Caribbean. J’Anna is interested in the ways colonial legacies have influenced built, natural, and social infrastructures in Jamaica, which in turn impact communities’ ability to cope with the realities of climate change.

Srihari Nageswaran is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. His prior research examined the relationship between India’s model of quasi-federalism and regionalist political mobilization in its southernmost state of Tamil Nadu. His tentative dissertation project leverages the tools of economic anthropology, critical geography, and South Asian studies to examine special economic zones in Chennai. Before joining Berkeley, Srihari received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology with honors and distinction at Stanford University.

Anna Palmer

Anna Palmer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the convergence of extractivism, (post)colonial development, and the climate crisis in the Caribbean through a qualitative and spatial lens. Her current work focuses on political decision-making and resistance to oil extraction in Guyana through content analysis and interview methods. She holds a BA in sociology from Occidental College.

Carolina de Wit is a third-year PhD student in History at UC Berkeley. My research focuses on the history of deviance, crime, and punishment in 19th—and 20th-century Brazil, it examines the intersection of legal medicine and social control, exploring how Brazil’s political elites used medical science and criminology to pathologize deviant behavior, framing it as a threat to public health and national development.

Ailén Vega’s work looks at an emerging movement against mercury contamination from illegal gold mining within Munduruku territory, situated within Tapajós River Basin of the Central Brazilian Amazon. She is particularly interested in the relationship between indigenous and western scientific knowledge practices in evidencing harm from chemical exposure within one of the most heavily mined indigenous territories in all of Brazil. Funding from the GDC allowed me to carry out follow-up research in collaboration with the Munduruku organizations I work with, consulting them on sensitive ethnographic matters and the progress of my research during the dissertation writing phase.