Graduate Students

Asya Anderson (asyaa at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2004. Asya received her B.A. in Anthropology from Vassar College. She is interested in cultural contact and exchange, especially regarding the power dynamics of the dominant and dominated in colonial, postcolonial, and globalizing contexts. In this vein, Asya is studying the francophone Caribbean, particularly Haiti and Martinique and the unique gender and racial ideologies which have come out of their respective colonial histories. Recently, she has also become interested in American and European expatriate groups residing in Southeast Asia and the ways in which these groups subtly replicate nineteenth century colonial society.

Nanao Akanuma (nanaoa at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003. Nanao completed her undergraduate studies in English Literature and Linguistics at Meiji Gakuin University in Japan. She majored in Anthropology at University of California at Irvine as an international exchange undergraduate student participating in the Education Abroad Program 2001-2002. During this time, Nanao focused mainly on how issues of modernity and ethnicity correlated with discourses of art and culture in the context of globalization and transnationalism.

The present subject of her research is sumo wrestling in Japan. She studies sumo as a reflection of changing power relations in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, she is interested in the political and economic implications of this "national sport," particularly how post-Cold War geopolitics relates with the rise of translocal popular culture. The theoretical issues that she addresses in her project include: the ultural politics of globalization, Japanese popular culture and capitalism, sport and the cultural construction of space, discourses of nationalism and transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific region (particularly Mongolia and Japan), and gender.

Preliminary fieldwork in Japan was funded by the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine in summers 2004 and 2005. She is currently conducting dissertation research in Japan with the support of the Pacifc Rim Research Program and the Center for Asian Studies.

Janet Alexanian (janeta at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003. Research interests include Iranian immigration, community and identification. Alexanian has received a Regents' Fellowship (2003, 2004), Pre-dissertation Research Award (2004), and funding for field research in the United States and France from the School of Social Sciences and Department of Anthropology (2004, 2005). Forthcoming publication, "Publicly Intimate Online: Iranian Weblogs in Southern California" is forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Andrea Ballestero (aballes at uci dot edu)
Andrea was admitted in 2005. Andrea was trained as a lawyer and worked for seven years as an instructor and project manager at the University for International Cooperation in Costa Rica. She came to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue a Masters in Environmental Policy from the University of Michigan (2004). She is currently conducting fieldwork for her dissertation which focuses on the production and transformation of the "value" of water in Costa Rica, Brazil and Sweden. In particular, she is interested in how commodities, human rights and nature are (re)produced and articulated into governance projects that embrace notions of experimentation, inclusion, and the global. To examine this process she is studying the apparent decentralization of "expertise" in an era in which politics, development, and reform tend to proclaim that all forms of knowledge and desire count. Also she is analyzing the politics of the production, negotiation and usage of legal and technoscientific tools (e.g. water rights, hydrological models, legal concession processes, property rights, pricing methodologies, water budgets) that are connected through transnational collaborative and knowledge sharing political networks. Her research is funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Sciences programs of the National Science Foundation, and UCI's School of Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Urban Water Research Center, Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, and Center for Unconventional Security Affairs.

Cristina Bejarano (cbejaran at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Cristina completed her MA in applied anthropology with an emphasis in medical anthropology in 2007. She is interested in the areas of social and cultural studies of science, medical anthropology, history, and Latin American studies.

Khaldun Bshara (kbshara at uci dot edu)
Admitted 2007. Khaldum Bsharais a conservation architect and a designer. He has been heading the Conservation Unit in Riwaq-Centre for Architectural Conservation since 1994. He has a BA in Architectural Engineering from Birzeit University, and MA in Conservation of Historic Towns and Buildings from R. Lemaire International Centre for Conservation / Catholic University of Leuven. He carried out many architectural design and architectural conservation projects in Palestine. He is the author and co-author of number of books and articles, including Riwaq's Guidelines for Maintenance and Restoration of Historic Buildings in Palestine (2005), and Ramallah, Architecture and History (2002).

Leksa Chmielewski (achmiele at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2009. Leksa received her BA in Cultural Anthropology and Chinese from Duke University in 2006. She has worked in museum collections curation and exhibit planning in the US, and transnational corporate social responsibility consulting in China. Leksa’s research interests include museum representation, history and memory, new media, consumption and class, China and the US.

Joshua Clark (clarkj1 at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2009. Josh holds a B.A. in Political Science from Butler University (2003) and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2007). While at UT, his studies focused on the political and legal struggles of indigenous peoples and peoples of African descent, exploring issues of nationalism, multiculturalism, discourses of race and ethnicity, and international human rights. He conducted fieldwork in El Salvador for his thesis, titled “Confusion, Conformity, and Contradiction: The Salvadoran State’s Reluctant Engagements with Indigenous Recognition.” During his M.A. program, Josh was also a member of a human rights research delegation to Colombia. He was a co-author of the group’s report concerning the flawed implementation of laws designed to provide Afro-Colombian communities with collective lands. Josh is currently focusing his studies on several developing sub-fields of political and legal anthropology, including anthropology of the state, of policy, and of human rights. Additional interests include bureaucratic and expert knowledge practices, scientism, schemes of classification of people, measurement and commensurability, subjectivity/subjectification, normativity, and the concepts of governmental and disciplinary power as elaborated by Michel Foucault. Prospective field sites: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, United Nations (Geneva).

Cheryl Deutsch (cdeutsch at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2009. Cheryl received her BA in Women's Studies from the George Washington University in 2006. On a Shapiro Traveling Fellowship, she then spent a year studying street vendors' organizing against supermarkets in Bombay and across India, followed by two years working with an Indian human rights NGO on the issues of street vendors' legalization and social security for informal workers. She is interested in how gender is mediated through consumption and the market in contemporary India. More broadly, she is interested in the idea of the informal economy, social movements, NGOs, political economy, space, theory, and good street food.

Marc DaCosta (marc.dacosta at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2009. Marc received his BA in Philosophy from Columbia University in 2006. After graduating, he worked as a strategy consultant in the field of intellectual property. His current research interests engage the social and cultural studies of science with particular emphasis on the discursive and phenomenological aspects of systems within the context of hacking and climatology.

Mark DuRocher (mduroche at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2008.

Elsa Fan (fane at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Elsa Fan is currently a third-year graduate student in anthropology. Her research interests focus on HIV/AIDS in China in terms of governance, citizenship and humanitarianism and the different opportunities/tensions enabled through AIDS. Prior to this, she worked extensively in the non-profit/non-governmental field, and spent many years with UNDP in China and Timor-Leste. She holds a master's degree in anthropology and development studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and bachelor degrees in anthropology and psychology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Allison Fish (afish at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003. Allison's primary research interests are in the areas of legal anthropology and knowledge production. A question that has directed much of her work to date is How are knowledge systems produced and managed through legal and quasi-legal forms? Her dissertation pursues one key mechanism--intellectual property rights. Specifically, this project addresses the above issues through an exploration through a case study that follows the application of intellectual property claims to yoga and the reactions that such claims have provoked. Her fieldwork is focused in India, but includes research segments in Hong Kong and the United States. In addition to her dissertation research Allison writes for the iCommons group Local Context-Global Commons.

Caitlin Fouratt (cfouratt at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2008. Completed BA in Spanish language and literature at Villanova University (PA) in 2004. Was a Fulbright Scholar to Costa Rica (2004-2005), where she studied Nicaraguan migration and xenophobia in the country. Completed her MPhil in Latin American Studies at Cambridge University (U.K.) in 2006. Her masters thesis focused on the experiences of Nicaraguan women living in squatter settlements in Costa Rica. After completing her degree, Caitlin returned to Costa Rica to work as a research consultant and study abroad program coordinator at the International Center for Sustainable Human Development. Caitlin's current research interests involve Central American migration, gender and transnational families.

R. Nalika Gajaweera (rgajawee at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2006. Nalika received her B.A in Anthropology and the Visual Arts from Occidental College in 2004. She received a Richter International Fellowship in 2003 to conduct fieldwork in London to study the British-Asian Underground music subculture in London. In 2005, Nalika was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in India studying the socio-cultural issues surrounding the outsourcing of call center work to India and its effects upon the lives of young Indian workers. During this year, Nalika became interested in how this virtual work enables young Indian workers to cultivate certain kinds of global cosmopolitan identities and middle-class consumer desires. Since joining UCI, Nalika has also done pre-dissertation research in Sri Lanka studying the adoption of information and communication technology by its rural communities. Her current dissertation research in Sri Lanka examines how Buddhist conceptions of "doing good" influence philanthropy and social work in the island. She is especially interested in how Buddhist philanthropists become involved through their social work in the project of nation making in the aftermath of disaster and crisis.

Philip Grant
Admitted in 2006. His work focuses on Iranian intellectuals, both in the diaspora (Southern California and Toronto) and in Iran. He is interested in the intellectual in the broad, "organic" sense and so his fieldwork is oriented toward a variety of activists as well as academics, writers, and philosophers. He is exploring both the multiple practices of being an intellectual and the philosophical, historical and genealogical articulations between and mutual constitution of the figure of the intellectual, the emergence of the public sphere, and the theologico-political in Iran. He holds an MA in Political Sociology from Sciences Po, Paris, and previously worked as an investment banker in London.

Eun Hae Jeong (ehjeong at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. She is currently studying reproductive technologies in South Korea. She is specifically interested in the production and use of genetic knowledge in reproductive technologies, as well in the field of adoption. Her broader interests include the development of genetic science and bioethics in South Korea.

Cortney Hughes (clhughes at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2004. Cortney received her B.S. from Iowa State University in anthropology and psychology. She earned her M.A. in anthropology from UCI and has completed the graduate feminist emphasis. Cortney’s work focuses on the relationship between reproduction, Islam, and development in Morocco. She is interested in how Islamic beliefs and practices surrounding fertility, gender, and motherhood parallel and contrast the precedents of the country’s current development policy. In particular, she looks at this relationship between Islam and development as it is experienced by Moroccan working and middle-class women. She investigates the meaning of “modernity” and “being modern” by examining biomedical reproductive practices that are promoted in health clinics around the capital Rabat and women’s interpretations of these practices. Cortney conducted long-term fieldwork in Morocco with grants from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (2008-2009) and the American Philosophical Society (2009). Her preliminary research (2005, 2006, and 2007) was supported by grants from the anthropology department and the School of Social Sciences at UCI.

Michael Hurley (hurleym at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2008. Michael completed his BA in Anthropology at UC Davis in 2007. His research interests include: Indonesia, Jakarta, urbanization, the phenomenology of space, informal settlement, and the history of urban planning.

Jeff Katcherian (jkatcher uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2004. Graduated from UC Irvine with a B.S. in biological sciences and a B.A. in international studies. Then moved on to American University to receive an M.A. in public anthropology. Jeff is conducting dissertation research on the bureaucratic management of "culture" in the European Union.

Robert Kett (rkett at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2009. BM in Music and International Studies from Northwestern University. Conducted research on emerging programming practice in concert halls in Chicago, Mexico City and Paris and how "classical" repertoires are unsettled by tendencies toward multiculturalism and commodification (2007-8). Following this work, he volunteered for an urban planning council in Chicago to analyze the discursive practices that facilitated the privatization of the city's public housing system under the Plan for Transformation. Robert is currently interested in the intersection of visual and musical culture and how this relates to questions of memory and materiality.

Jordan Kraemer (jkraemer at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2006. Jordan holds an MA in social science from the University of Chicago, and a BA in medieval studies from Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on the role of new technologies and digital media in everyday life, particularly in the context of youth and consumer culture. She has conducted field research with subcultural youth in Chicago and Berlin, and received a summer research grant from the Center for German and European Studies. She plans to continue examining questions of new media in the construction of the social imaginary, particularly with regards to local, regional, and global scales.

Matthew Lane (mattlane at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2009. Matt most recently finished the Master of Arts Program in Social Sciences at the University of Chicago in the anthropology cohort. His field research and thesis focused on explorations of the scrap metal economy in Chicago's alleyways. Prior to this research, he taught for six years in rural southwestern Virginia in the public and private school settings. Matt's teaching centered upon literature, creative writing and cultural anthropology courses. This teaching experience arose out of the M.Ed degree that he completed at the University of Florida in Secondary English. Matt's undergraduate work at the University of Florida focused on a double major in anthropology and in English. His scholarship as an undergraduate focused largely upon feminist approaches to literature and culture culminating in an anthropology thesis addressing gender discrimination in public schools and an English thesis exploring how Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner depicted space, place and gender in their representations of the South. Matt's current work is a continued interest in the domestic and international scrap metal economies. He is interested in questions relating to value (both personal and financial), global capitalism, money, phenomenology, recycling, labor, space, place, and materiality. Topical interests include the United States, India, and Kenya.

Janny Li (jli18 at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2008. Anthropology (Asian Humanities Minor), B.A. 2006 UCLA. From 2003-2006, she conducted fieldwork in Los Angeles, London, Taiwan, and Hong Kong resulting in an undergraduate thesis exploring the religious conversion and missionary practices of Buddhist nuns. Her current interests broadly include phenomenology and embodiment with specific interests in the history and therapeutic and meaning-making practices of ghost hunters and the experiences of their clients in New York City.

Alexandra Lippman (lippmana at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Alexandra received her BA in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 2005. After graduating, she worked in film in Rio de Janeiro and New York City. Her interests include ethnographic filmmaking, dance, transnationalism, and the politics of race, space, and media in Rio de Janeiro.

Adonia Lugo (lugoa at uci dot edu)
Admitted 2007. Adonia received her B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College in 2005. Her research focuses on intentionality and authenticity in culture change movements. Alternative economies and and the alternative transportation movement make practice-oriented interventions in the market-driven landscape that has developed in automotive LA. As grassroots activists and policy-oriented advocates seek to redesign sociality in the United States, how do they negotiate issues of public and private space in the setting of Los Angeles? Using the embodied practice of bicycling as a locus, Adonia studies issues of consciousness, phenomenology, and urban habitus at nonprofits and in the street.

Sean Mallin (smallin at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2009. Sean completed his B.A. in Economics at the University of Notre Dame in 2009. His interests include political economy, anthropology of development, trauma, subjectivity, and anthropology of violence. As an undergraduate, he studied rebuilding in post-Katrina New Orleans during two summers of volunteer and field work, and his senior thesis focused on the formation of a "rebuilding discourse" as the complex effect of politics, memory, structural violence, and the tourism industry. He hopes to continue research on post-disaster reconstruction of place, culture, and identity.

Eudelio Martinez (eudeliom at uci edu)
Admitted in 2006, Eudelio grew up in a small farming community in Central Washington State. He received his B.A. in Anthropology from Eastern Washington University. His present research focuses on the consumption of instant ramen in Mexico. Eudelio is particularly interested in understanding the relationship between the liberalization of the Mexican economy, a process that culminated in 2007 with the full implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the increased consumption of processed foods-including instant ramen-by both rural and urban Mexicans. Some theoretical issues that he addresses in his project include: the role that cultural context plays in the localization strategies employed by food-related transnational corporations in their operations abroad, and the relationship between macrolevel shifts in trade and governance-like NAFTA-and the emergence of new landscapes of food accessibility and scarcity.

Connie McGuire (cmcguire at uci.edu)
Entered in 2004. Connie works in the fields of the Anthropology of Law and Policy, Legal Anthropology, and Transnational Feminist Studies. Connie's dissertation research is with a transnational network of policymakers who wrote a federal gang policy: The United States Strategy to Combat Criminal Gangs from Central America and Mexico. She will conduct her dissertation fieldwork in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Guatemala City, Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, and Mexico City in 2009-2010, by mapping the history of the problematization of two specific gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang, which are now targets of this federal-level transnational policy. Connie has worked professionally conducting ethnographic research about so-called Central American gangs in the Washington DC area and writing a Resource Manual for attorneys working on gang-related asylum cases with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a non-profit, human rights organization that works to influence U.S. policy toward Latin America. She is also a member of the Transnational Network for the Study of Youth Gangs, which is housed at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM). Connie has received support for her research from the National Science Foundation's Division of Law and Social Science Dissertation Improvement Grant, the UC Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS) Dissertation Research Grant, the UC Regents Pre-dissertation Research Fellowship, the UC Regent's Early Career Fellowship, and UCI's Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies (GPACS) and Department of Anthropology. Connie also holds a Master's degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas, Austin and a BA in Sociology from Vassar College. In her spare time, Connie challenges herself training for and competing in sprint and olympic distance triathlons.

Elham Mireshghi (emireshg at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Elham received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley where she also completed a minor in Anthropology. She also has experience working in the intellectual property arena and is a licensed patent agent. Her interests are currently quite varied and range from globalization, mass media, visual anthropology and popular culture to technology, intellectual property, and medical anthropology. She hopes to conduct her research in the Middle East (particularly Iran).

Erin Moran (emoran uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005, Erin Moran received her M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and her B.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies from UC Santa Cruz. During that time, she focused on the relationship between the discursive construction of immigrant women in California and their subjective experiences of migration to the US. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, Erin volunteered for the US Peace Corps in Ukraine, and worked in the U.S. at a NGO serving African refugees. Her research interests include migration, citizenship, gender, human rights, and nationalisms. Her current research examines the relationship between legal discourse and refugee and asylum seeking women's political subjectivity in Ireland. In particular, she is interested in understanding how refugee and asylum seeking women are experiencing the impact of the 27th Amendment to Constitution of Ireland (which abolished birthright citizenship) in their daily lives, and how they are negotiating or resisting its effects.

Guillermo Narvaez (gnarvaez uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003. Guillermo is currently conducting dissertation research on social and environmental certifications in the coffee trade between the US and Nicaragua. His research examines how Fair Trade and other sustainability certifications fit into new forms of neoliberal governance through their reliance on transnational voluntary standards and independent auditing, thereby privatizing the regulation of the production of agricultural commodities. He has conducted fieldwork in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras and East Timor, with funding from the Department of Anthropology and the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. His interests include coffee and the emergence of Central American nations, postcolonialism, development, neoliberalism, transnationalism, and the anthropology of food and consumption.

Taylor Nelms (tnelms at uci at edu)
Admitted in 2008. Taylor completed an MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a BA in Anthropology and Comparative Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University. He plans to return to Quito, Ecuador, where he did research for his undergraduate and Master's theses, for dissertation fieldwork, which will focus on changes in understandings of money and value since the official adoption of the US dollar by the Ecuadorian state. He maintains interests in kinship and family, the middle class, the space of the home, property, indebtedness, and animals.

Natalie Newton (nnewton at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005. BA in women's studies, UCLA 2005. Vietnam, Vietnamese gender/kinship/sexuality, queer studies, transnational feminisms, queer activisms.

Lee Ngo (lngo4 at uci at edu)
Admitted in 2008. Lee received his BA in Sociology with Film Studies from Yale University in 2005. Lee wrote his undergraduate thesis on the sociological effects of the implementation of digital technology in the American film industry. After several years of working in television in Portland, Oregon, Lee is currently studying transnational film and television production processes among the ethnic Vietnamese diaspora, focusing on the current debate over authentic representations of Vietnam among and between its domestic and overseas constituents. His preliminary fieldwork, funded by the School of Social Sciences, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Asian American Studies, and the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, has thus far been conducted in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Sydney, and Orange County. During the summer of 2009, Lee participated in the Vietnamese Advanced Summer Institute (VASI), an intensive language program funded by the US Departmant of Education Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program. Lee is also an active member of the Vietnamese International Film Festival (VIFF) and the Vietnam Arts and Letters Association (VAALA). He is also a freelance consultant specializing in film distribution and production in Little Saigon.

Joanne Randa Nucho (jnucho at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Joanne earned a BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts where she studied film and television production, and interned with documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. She has screened her films in various festivals, including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008. She holds a Master’s degree from UCLA's Islamic Studies Inter-disciplinary Program and attended the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) in Cairo, Egypt. Joanne’s broader research interests include urban space, subjectivity, and modernity, particularly in the Middle East. Her dissertation research will focus on a number of urban development initiatives underway in and around Beirut, Lebanon. She has received support for her research from the Department of Anthropology, the School of Social Sciences, and the Center for Citizen Peace-building at UC Irvine.

Seo Young Park (pseoyoun uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005. Seo Young received a B.A. in Sociology and French Literature and M.A. in Culture and Gender Studies from Yonsei University, South Korea. Her current research explores the experience and making of time in Dongdaemun Market, South Korea. She is interested in looking at the construction of temporalities of the 24-hour city through NGO experiment, transnational circuits of production-consumption, and labor experiences. Seo Young is also the pursuing the Graduate Feminist Emphasis in the Women's Studies Department. Seo Young presented papers at Thinking Gender, Annual Graduate Student Research Conference and American Anthropological Association, and was awarded the Art Rubel Graduate Student Paper Award in 2007. To support preliminary fieldwork, she received grants from the Anthropology and Center for Asian Studies at UCI.

Stephen Rea (srea at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2008. Stephen holds an MA in Social Sciences from The University of Chicago (2005) where his master's thesis explored the public circulation of the Abu Ghraib photographs through the rubric of Peircean semiotics, and a BA in Cross-Cultural Relations from Simon's Rock College of Bard (2003). During 2001, he spent one semester of fieldwork in Rabat, Morocco, and his undergraduate thesis presented a discursive analysis of the Western Sahara conflict.

Stephen's current research interests include online computer gaming in South Korea in particular, where he spent 2006-2007, and more generally in the role of technology in expanding human potentiality. He is also interested in the cultural component of approaches to utilizing new technologies and the centrifugal movement of "in-world" gaming speech from the sites where gaming is practiced to non-gaming environments.

Morgan Romine (mromine at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Morgan Romine is a third year PhD student at the University of California, Irvine. She received her BA in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2003. Before beginning her graduate studies at UCI, she spent four years with video game publisher Ubisoft in San Francisco, CA doing community management and online marketing while also managing an all-female team of professional video gamers sponsored by Ubisoft. Morgan’s current research interests include sociality in online video game communities, collaborative and competitive gaming practices, social networking and communications technology, constructions of gender in gamer culture, and design practices within game development studios. Her dissertation research aims to look at how social phenomena like deviance (ie. griefing), addiction, and complex collaborative efforts (ie. dungeon raids) are produced by how players and makers jointly imagine and interact with their online game world. She has received funding for her research from the Department of Anthropology, the School of Social Sciences, and the Intel/UCI People and Practices Research initiative for which she is currently doing a study of Xbox Live gamers. She is a graduate research assistant for the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion.

Kim Sullivan (sullivak at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005 with a Social Science Fellowship. Kim Sullivan holds B.A. degrees in Music and Classics. She is interested in anthropology of modernity and anthropology of science and technology.

Erica Vogel (vogele at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005. Erica received a BA in Creative Writing and Social History from Carnegie Mellon University. From 2000-2004, she taught English and managed a language school in Seoul, South Korea. While living in Korea, Erica witnessed thousands of migrant factory workers lose their legal status with the implementation of a new migration policy, the Employee Permit System. Her current research explores the impact of this policy through the experience of Peruvian migrants in South Korea. She is interested in looking at the relationship between these migrants, the churches that minister to them (Catholic, evangelical, and Jehovah’s Witness), and state modes of surveillance in South Korea. To support preliminary fieldwork, she received grants from the Pacific Rim Research Foundation (2007), the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine (2006, 2007), and UCI’s Center for Asian Studies (2007). She has presented papers on this subject at the AAA meetings (2007) and at the First International Congress at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru (2007). Her dissertation research will be supported by a grant from the Korean Foundation (2008-2009). She is currently an Editorial Assistant for American Ethnologist Book Reviews.

Lydia Zacher (lzacher at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2008. Lydia received her BA in Gender Studies and Latin American Studies in 2002 from the University of Chicago. Upon graduation, she was awarded a University of Chicago Human Rights Internship grant, which took her to central Mexico to work in a midwifery training hospital. She spent the next five years working on various women's health projects in Mexico and the U.S., as well as completing training as a birth assistant and lactation educator. Lydia plans to focus her research on changing childbirth practices in Mexico and the U.S., and to look at how immigration and globalization affect cultural beliefs about health and the body.

Sana Zaidi (szaidi1at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2008.

Ather Zia (atherz at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2008. Ather Zia is from Kashmir. Her research interests lie in the issues of conflict, media, gender and human rights. She wants to explore the critical and cultural theories of communication, feminism, human rights, and nationalism in conjunction with postcolonial theory in order to yield a broader understanding of women’s agency and contextualized narratives. She has two Masters Degrees, one in Mass Communication and Journalism from Kashmir University and another in Communication from Cal State University Fullerton. Before coming to U.S. on a Fellowship she has had varied experiences as a journalist with BBC, administrator with Kashmir Government, writer, activist, and a teacher. Ather has several publications to her credit including a book on poetry. She continues to be a part of social justice projects and is editing an e-zine titled Kashmir Lit.

Shaozeng Zhang (zhangs at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Shaozeng received a B.A. in sociology and a M.A. in anthropology from Peking University, China. He is currently working on his dissertation project about the ongoing process of making carbon credit payment policy in the Brazilian Amazon based on the new CO2 emission reduction scheme of REDD (Reduced Emission through Deforesation and Degradation), (to be) approved by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2009. Shaozeng's research looks at the coproduction of expert knowledge and politics in Brazil's REDD policymaking in the shifting context of global climate change politics.