Announcing Our Spring 2025 Undergraduate Research Fellows
Each year, the Berkeley Center for New Media pairs undergraduates with a graduate student mentor, offering them the chance to complete real, graduate level research while at Cal. We are thrilled to announce this semester's Fellows.
Eshani Jha
Archive of Olfactory Narratives in Cinema
Eshani is a senior majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. With a strong foundation in computer vision and computational photography, Eshani is passionate about sustainable technologies and software development. She enjoys creating art that blends cutting-edge computation with human-centered narratives. Outside of academics, she has authored Legal Status: Fight to Survive, a book inspired by her experiences as a first-generation American and her observations of immigrant struggles. Eshani is excited to contribute to BCNM’s vibrant community by exploring the role of computational methods in reimagining the boundaries of art, photography, and technology.
Eshani will work with Arianna Khmelniuk to organize a movie olfaction collection. Almost every movie mentions smells, stinks, or fragrances, and assumptions, binaries. This research project focuses on patterns of prejudice, alienation, and power of narrative. The films surveyed are a random selection of genres: drama, comedy, romance, thriller, action, horror, history, fantasy, sci-fi, documentary, and crime. They are summing up the era clusters in which the events of the films take place: present-day, the 90s, the 60s-80s, and the 19th century. The dominant locations where the events occur in the film are the USA, England, France, China, and Korea.
Yuqi Tian
Decentering Humans through Interactive Experience Design
Yuqi Tian is a fourth-year undergrad in BCNM majoring in Geography, Italian Studies, and Comparative Literature. She studies urban spaces and visual media. Outside of school, Yuqi likes getting boba with her friends and growing succulents.
Yuqi will work with Yangyang Yang to explore the anthropocentric worldview's contribution to environmental degradation. This project aims to create embodied interactive experiences that encourage people to temporarily decenter from their human perspective, recognize the more-than-human world, understand the subjectivity and intrinsic value of nonhumans, and further foster a shift from an anthropocentric way of thinking towards a pluralistic one.
Laila Walker & Mckenzie Diep
Bottomlands: Mapping Black Cemeteries in the Mid-South
Laila is a senior studying computer and data science. With a passion for recruiting and retaining underrepresented students in STEM disciplines, Laila has held five leadership roles at Cal with her most impactful roles in NSBE where she is chapter president. To find more solutions to protect underrepresented students in STEM, she is pursuing a graduate degree in human-computer interaction to design tools and interfaces that make programming more accessible. Her goal is to create a more comfortable STEM world in order to create more comfortable technologies for the general public. Laila is excited to contribute to BCNM's community that supports this goal.
Mckenzie is studying Economics, Urban Studies, and Geospatial Information Science and Technology. She is passionate about tackling barriers to upward mobility, reducing the effects of discriminatory policies, and analyzing the spatial distribution of opportunity. Mckenzie has used mapping and data to shape research and policy at the University of Toronto, Bay Area Council, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Through her work, she hopes to help to uplift communities and tell untold narratives.
Laila and Mckenzie will work with Maria Pettis on address pending erasures of place, memory and sites of meaning by archiving and eventually constructing a public database of traces, scattered across material, mnemonic, and digital archives. The project will draw on themes of Black Geographies, New Media, Human-Environmental Geographies, and Geo-Spatial Methods. This project specifically concerns the digital mapping of historic yet neglected Black cemeteries in the Lower Mississippi River Basin, which will serve as the groundwork for a central chapter of the broader dissertation project and set the stage for advocacy and further study and analysis of emerging social-spatial patterns in the region at present.
Nerissa Liu
Sonic Blackness: Hip-Hop Poetics
Nerissa Liu is a second-year student majoring in English, minoring in Creative Writing, and intending to minor in Clinical and Counseling Psychology. As a student of the craft of writing, she explores how words influence the human psyche. Her favorite forms to write are short fiction and poetry. At Cal, she began participating in poetry open mics, which introduced her to sound as an artistic dimension. Performing in front of a live audience altered her approach to crafting pieces that move people.
Nerissa will work with Vincente Perez on bridging the study of Black rappers and poets through sound studies. This project seeks to think about the metaphysics of Black sound as they are sounded out in both poetry and Hip-Hop. The dissertation argues that humanities-based scholarship tends towards a trajectory that focuses on meaning as defined by western modernity and white supremacy. It suggests that a humanistic approach to hip-hop and poetry has rendered much of the work within these forms moot and incable of complexity because these frameworks rely on logics that are logocentric and antiblack.