Social and Cultural Anthropology Students and Alumni
Current MA Students
Oren Kroll-Zelden
"The community service work I have been engaged in recently has been through building alliances between Jews and Palestinians in the United States.
"Through this work I have been involved with a community of Jews and Palestinians in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as a community of people throughout the United States working to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through engagement in a critical process of self and communal reflection as a tool for understanding how our identities are practiced in our daily lives.
"Most recently I organized a conference for a small group of Jewish and Palestinian students to work on how we can effectively build alliances among ourselves and within our home communities and to learn more about effective strategies of grassroots activism to work toward peace and justice in Israel/Palestine.
"This work has been very meaningful for me, as I have gone through this critical process of self and communal reflection because it has enabled me to think about and understand my roles and responsibilities as a Jew to work toward justice.
"Throughout the PhD program, this work will continue to grow as I grow, and the program will enable me to have an impact on my community service work as I integrate thought and action into my life's work.
"I see my community service work focusing on alliance building and education surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but moving beyond the Jewish and Palestinian communities to include those not identified as Jew or Palestinian.
"This summer I will be leading an immersive educational experience with Abraham's Vision and the Center for Transformative Education called Beyond Bridges: Balkans. BB:B is a summer program that takes university students through the Balkans on a journey of comparative conflict analysis and conflict transformation to learn about the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I will be leading educational seminars and group discussions as well as planning curriculum on how to use the Balkan conflicts as an entry point to re-examine and de-exceptionalize conflicts around the world, mainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Ashley Philpot
"Community organizing and advocacy work is inseparable from my education and scholarship. Without being a part of social struggle and building alliances with the communities in which I engage in research, I simply could not move forward with my education.
"Over the past year I have had the incredible opportunity and privilege of working with multiple constituencies of queer and immigration justice advocates, and socio-political movements at the intersections of racial and economic justice. Since the spring of 2008 I have been an active part of the local, San Francisco-based organization, Community United Against Violence (CUAV).
"CUAV is a multicultural, anti-oppression organization that exists to respond to violence against and within queer communities in the Bay Area. I am a part of CUAV’s Speaker’s Bureau, which trains queer and trans people to speak in to middle and high schools in the San Francisco Unified School District about the violences of homophobia and heteronormativity.
"I have also been working with CUAV to develop the Healing Oppression Project (HOP). HOP is training program that brings together queer people of color and their white allies, utilizing somatic healing practices and cross-cultural alliance building, in order to challenge institutionalized, interpersonal, and internalized racism and homophobia.
"Over the past six months, I have also been working with the Asylum Documentation Project at the National Immigration Justice Center (NIJC) in San Francisco. As a part of the research I have been engaged with queer women of color seeking asylum in the U.S., I have been volunteering at NIJC updating, organizing, and compiling critical documents, reports, articles, and news releases for queer women asylum seekers and their attorneys.
"Through this work, I have found that the lack of documentation of issues around women and asylum reflects the larger structural and multi-layered invisibilities of women’s struggles in a post-colonial world.
"As a queer white woman with great national and intellectual privilege, my work with these communities is important because it intervenes on multiple forms of oppression, enables alliance building for real, sustainable social movement, and is integral to the development of ongoing practices of freedom and justice.
"In the Anthropology program our research is one of participation and advocacy; without being in alliance with these communities, our work loses its rigor and meaning. As I move into the PhD program, it will be necessary not only to maintain these relationships to community, but to deepen and build a larger network of activists, advocates, and organizations. “Community service” is not just about doing the “right” thing, but it is the fabric with which my life is woven together and made meaningful."
MA Alumni
Kate Hymans, MA ('07), Kate is working as the Senior Case Manager with Survivors International in San Francisco. In this position, she coordinates health and social services for survivors of torture, war trauma, LGBTQ hate crimes, and gender-based persecution who have fled to the United States.
In this capacity, she acts as the liaison between attorneys representing the survivors in asylum cases, medical providers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social service providers to provide opportunities for the survivors to heal their wounds.
Additionally, she supports efforts of the organization to do outreach and offer trainings and education about both the needs of survivors and the needs for policy change related to torture.
It is her hope that she can contribute toward one day putting herself out of a job so that torture in all its forms is a thing of the past, and she draws strongly upon her Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation to question institutionalized oppression that perpetuates these forms of violence.
Jordon L. M. Johnson, MA ('05),currently in a doctoral program at University of New Mexico.
"The Anthropology Program allowed for the complexity in my history to emerge, be critically reflected upon, and radically shifted.
"This shift generated learning about transgender identities as historically silenced, eliminated and considered dangerous to dominant cultural understandings. As a transgender person, my voice has been strengthened, and my commitment to alliance building has expanded.
"One vital lesson I learned through my studies is that a body, a life, a community matters. My research focuses on the impact of gender binaries in the United States specifically in relation to female-bodied transgender people."
Nina Radovic, MA ('06), ;teaches anthropology at Universidad de Artes y Ciencias Sociales (UARCIS) at Valparaíso , Chile. Her classes examine 20th century U.S. anthropology theory, globalization/environment/human rights, and 20th century French social theory. She also teaches courses cultural anthropology and globalization at a seminary.
She is in the second semester of her doctoral program in American Studies (referring to all of the Americas) at the University of Santiago (USACH), with an emphasis on social and political studies. Her studies focus will focus on Environmental Anthropology, examining issues connected to dams, development, and governance.
Erik Schnabel, MA ('08), based in San Francisco, currently works as a Membership Coordinator with Grantmakers Without Borders, a philanthropic support organization working with foundations that support international social justice work.
Erik also serves as a co-chair on the Board of Directors of the School of Unity and Liberation, a political education organization based in Oakland, CA, and on the Coordinating Committee of the group Other Worlds are Possible, a multimedia and organizing collaborative working to share and build alternatives to globalization.
Other MA Graduates
Megan Borsuk, MA ('08), currently working with human rights and education in Sudan.
Rodrigo Guimares, MA ('03), chaired a program in environmental studies at the University of Sao Paolo, currently returned to our Department to complete his PhD.
Megan McNamara, MA ('07), now a PhD student in Anthropology at University of California-Santa Cruz.
Indulata Prasad, MA ('07), now a PhD student in Anthropology at University of Texas-Austin.
Laura Rivas, MA ('08), program associate, Immigration Justice and Rights Program, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
Current Doctoral Students
Noa Kram
"Before I began my studies in the Anthropology MA Program, I was working as a defense attorney in Israel. I found program to be unique, academically rigorous, critical and activist.
"After completing the MA, I decided to apply and was accepted into the doctoral program here. Studying in this Program has changed the way I understand the world and myself. I am learning to better understand forms of social oppression and liberation.
"I am gaining new perspectives in understanding and holding myself accountable as an Israeli, as a Jew, and as a woman. This is an empowering experience for me, both intellectually and emotionally. I feel lucky to be in a diverse community; it inspires learning.
"My dissertation will engage issues of state mediated human rights violations among Bedouin Palestinian communities inside Israel, to contribute to peace and justice between Israelis and Palestinians."
Annie Paradise
"Growing up white and female, and working class on the Canadian border in rural Maine, I often understood education as a way up and out, and once there, a way in—it was mobility, it was complex and cosmopolitan, and eventually, too, it would be self-understanding, fulfillment.
"In the anthropology graduate program, education becomes a commitment to engage with the world, a shifting foundation to hear and build responsibility, an obligation to listen, act, interrupt.
"It is a push to relentlessly begin again with perspectives for a genealogy of now; it is a process, terrifying and vibrant, that challenges all of us to continually dismantle and renegotiate how we bear witness to the world.
"Working together to question what’s quiet, to recognize the inextricability of thinking and action, of power and knowledge, it becomes our job to take responsibility, to revolt. Obligation arrives; the point is to change the world."
Pei Wu
"The Anthropology Program has helped me build capacities to respond to oppression in the world, it has also challenged--and continues to challenge--the contexts through which I understand social justice, cultural difference, dominance, and resistance.
"It breaks apart assumptions, challenging me to think with greater specificity and attentiveness to history, culture, power, and context, so that I can intervene in the world effectively and ethically.
"I can think of no other academic program in the US with such a clear commitment to social justice, appearing not only on paper, but in words, actions, and through lives.
"This has been critical as I completed my MA here and began my doctoral work connected to the genocide of 2002 in Gujarat, India, looking at issues of violence and displacement as they impact the Muslim community."
Doctoral Alumni
Rucha Ambikar, PhD (2008), is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information and Society at the University of Washington's Information School. Rucha's dissertation researched religious schools in India that indoctrinate students into right wing nationalism.
Rucha's work involves exploring the social, cultural, economic and political impact of new technologies (such as the Internet) on people's lives, prioritizing underserved communities--in the Global South and underprivileged sections in the Global North.
This research will inform policy recommendations that increase people's access to technology specific to their communities needs. Rucha continues her commitment to secular education through relationships with progressive, secular schools in India.
Lisa Moore, PhD (2008), currently Assistant Dean of Multicultural Affairs at Reed College.
"As a doctoral student in the Anthropology Program, I found the coursework to be intellectually challenging. My research focused on land retention issues among the Gullah communities of the South Carolina Islands, with whom I share ancestry.
"What is especially gratifying is the learning that happens between my peers and having that be supported and encouraged by the faculty within the Anthropology Program.
"There is an expectation [in the program] that what you do with the papers you write, the books you read, and the conversations you have with others will be a part of changing the world.
"Everyone seems to appreciate and understand themselves and others as active participants in movements of justice. There is a sense that you are a part of something larger than yourself."
Other Doctoral Graduates
M. Ligaya Hattari, PhD ('02), Special Projects Coordinator at the California Indian Manpower Consortium, and adjunct faculty in the Anthropology Department at California State University, Sacramento.
Lee Lo, PhD ('07), working as a counselor with the Hmong community in Sacramento, CA.
Mine Sato, PhD ('05), working at the United Nations.
Ritendra Tamang, PhD ('02), Visiting faculty, Department of Communication Studies, Mount Royal College, Calgary.
Rafael Reyes-Ruiz: MA ('95), PhD, completed in Anthropology at New School for Social Research, currently associate professor of Anthropology, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE.
