Announcing Our Summer 2025 Research Award Recipients
Congratulations to our 2025 Summer Research Award recipients from Ethnic Studies, Environmental Design, Geography, Information, Film and Media, Rhetoric, and Anthropology.
Irene Franco Rubio
Irene’s summer research project, Archiving Resistance and Multiracial Coalition Building in Arizona, examines how grassroots movements use new media to document resistance and foster cross-racial solidarity. This community-engaged project explores the role of digital storytelling, community archiving, and participatory media in countering state violence, particularly in response to Arizona’s anti-immigrant and racialized policing laws, such as SB1070 and the recently passed Prop 314 (SB1070 2.0). Irene’s research investigates how historically oppressed communities—particularly Black, Latinx, and Indigenous organizers—leverage digital tools to preserve movement histories, mobilize for policy change, and disrupt dominant narratives of criminalization. Through participatory action research (PAR), she will co-create a digital archive that documents testimonios, oral histories, and multimedia materials from community members engaged in these struggles. This archive will serve as both a historical record and an organizing tool, offering accessible resources that strengthen ongoing advocacy efforts.
Omar Mohammad
Omar has worked on multiple independent design and research projects regarding Afghanistan and its “lack” of published and searchable design histories, theories, and culture. These projects engage in topics such as speculative typography design and visual flag research (vexillology). He intends to focus on this type of work and to push it even further through academic research and community engagement. Omar is in the process of introducing New Media and the Digital Humanities as a framework to study, conceptualize, and reframe 20th Century Afghan art, design, and culture. He plans to work with the Breshna Foundation for Culture’s Library Working Group, using New Media both as a theoretical framework to guide the project and as a practical tool to publish and share the group’s outcomes.
Tamara Jamil
Tamara’s project investigates recent and proposed jail construction in rural California, focusing on how carceral development targets low-income and racialized communities through geographic and aesthetic strategies. She explores how rural areas are framed as "blighted" and thus rendered disposable, making them prime sites for jail expansion. Drawing from environmental justice scholar Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” she argues that the current rural jail boom is a gradual, often invisible form of systemic harm. This summer, Tamara will begin fieldwork in Tuolumne, Mono, and Humboldt Counties—three regions at different stages of jail development. Using Forensic Architecture’s method of Situated Testimony, she will conduct interviews supported by 3D reconstructions of these communities, layering oral histories with archival materials. Her goal is to create a digital living archive that documents past, present, and speculative post-carceral futures.
Yangyang Yang
Yangyang’s project, Indigenous Mixed Reality Science Experience (IMRSE), is a three-year collaboration based at The Lawrence Hall of Science that centers Indigenous and Ohlone youth in the co-design of mixed reality museum exhibits. Now midway through, the project brings together Indigenous families, educators, museum professionals, and HCI researchers to create interactive exhibits grounded in Indigenous ecological knowledge and values. As a GSR, Yangyang has designed and facilitated co-design workshops and developed prototypes for three exhibits: Acorn Gathering, Tule Boat Journey, and a Music Experience. Her summer research will focus on distilling these experiences into a framework for how co-design scaffolds Indigenous youth’s learning across both STEM and cultural domains. She is also interested in how values like reciprocity and environmental stewardship can be translated into new media through collaborative design.
Ziwei Chen
Ziwei’s research explores the relationship between infrastructural development and urban experience in contemporary China, focusing on spaces like train stations and shopping malls that together form what he terms the “urban interior.” This concept captures how digital and material technologies—such as 5G networks, embedded screens, glass, lighting, and air conditioning—mediate everyday life, enabling consumption and mobility while also facilitating surveillance and control. His project intervenes in media and urban studies by centering architectural mediation in discussions of smart cities and post-socialist modernity. Ziwei will conduct pre-dissertation fieldwork that includes archival research in Beijing on early PRC-era urban planning and visual culture, and ethnographic site visits to shopping malls across major and mid-sized Chinese cities. Through documentation and observation, he aims to trace the evolution of commercial architecture and its entanglement with state power, media technologies, and urban life, eventually contributing to his dissertation and a future ethnographic film.
Maria Pettis
Maria’s dissertation research investigates the politics of federal archives, digital mapping, and the role of emerging technologies in locating and identifying African American cemeteries in the Mississippi Delta. She plans to return to Bolivar County, Mississippi this summer to conduct on-the-ground fieldwork at approximately 34 cemetery sites that currently lack verified racial or burial data. These sites represent key gaps in a broader dataset of over 250 cemeteries she has already documented remotely. Her work involves critical “ground truthing” techniques, field surveys, and imaging to verify and enrich the digital records of these spaces. This fieldwork will not only advance her dissertation but also inform the use of aerial imagery and deep learning models to identify hidden or unmarked cemeteries in adjacent, less-documented counties across the Delta.
Lee Crandall
Lee's dissertation explores the political ecologies of technoeconomic development, focusing on how digital infrastructures like crypto mining sites, data centers, and planned tech cities impact land and communities. Their research highlights how venture capitalists and state developers frame land as empty or inefficient, while Indigenous communities and local residents assert longstanding cultural, ecological, and spiritual connections to place. This summer, Lee will conduct fieldwork in western upstate New York, visiting sites like the STAMP Data Center campus, the Micron Semiconductor Site, and the Chautauqua Institution. They will document these landscapes through audio and visual media, attend local city council meetings, and engage with resistance coalitions including members of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. This work supports a multimedia project that contrasts developer visions with local knowledge and resistance. Lee will also investigate the Chautauqua Institution’s historical and architectural legacy, as it serves as a surprising model for speculative tech cities like Edge Esmerelda.
Zina Wang
Zina’s research reimagines the global history of computing by centering Hong Kong’s overlooked role in semiconductor production between the 1960s and 1980s. Her project challenges dominant, state-centered narratives by highlighting how laborers, machines, and underground networks in East Asia reshaped the contours of microelectronics manufacturing. This summer, Zina will conduct fieldwork and interviews in Hong Kong with former factory workers and industry participants to recover these untold stories. She explores both the labor-intensive back-end processes and the informal cultures of consumption, such as DIY radio assembly and government crackdowns on unauthorized electronics. Her work traces how human-machine systems and trans-border networks blurred the boundaries between labor, technology, and the state. Zina aims to document these material histories and offer a more nuanced, ground-up account of computing’s global development.
Caleb Murray-Bozeman
Caleb’s summer research will support the development of an experimental video project centered on Sausal Creek in Oakland, CA. Blending documentary, fiction, and performance, Caleb will use mobile cameras and site-specific staging to capture the creek’s transformation from forested hills to industrial culverts, reflecting on the tensions between nature and urbanization. The project incorporates historical research, environmental observation, and reimagined fairytales to explore themes of transformation, disappearance, and memory. By filming from within the creek itself and crafting layered narratives, Caleb seeks to reframe how we see and understand changing landscapes. His work highlights how media technologies can serve as tools for environmental storytelling and cultural reflection.
Seehee Lee
Seehee's research focuses on the increasing precariousness of tech workers in Silicon Valley and Pangyo Techno Valley amidst the rising trend of unionization. Her work investigates how economic and technological uncertainty, including mass layoffs and the impact of AI, shape workers’ experiences in these high-tech centers. Through ethnographic research, including interviews and digital ethnography, Seehee explores how tech workers navigate job insecurity and organize collectively using digital platforms like Blind, Discord, and Slack. Her project examines what empowers or hinders these workers’ activism, especially in response to automation and shifting labor dynamics. Seehee aims to understand the tensions between the desire for stability and the tech industry’s flexibility, shedding light on alternative futures that tech workers envision.