Graduate Fellows Below you will find an alphabetical list of the Graduate Fellows and Affiliates of the Urban Ethnography Lab with information about their research and areas of interest. Gwen Berumen Sánchez is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and a WGS affiliate. She is broadly interested in feminism, care work, and racial capitalism. Her master’s thesis explored the relationship between self-care and liberation movements. Her current project examines caring labor in women’s boutique health clinics in the new economy. She holds a BA in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Sociology from Brandeis University in addition to an MA from the University of Texas at Austin. Tomás Capalbo is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a BA in Sociology and an MA in Environmental and Territorial Policies from the University of Buenos Aires. As a master’s student, he developed a research project on the role of popular sectors in the implementation of public policies. Based on an ethnographic study in a city of Buenos Aires slum, he analyzed the effects of participatory roundtables -which brought together different actors to work on an urbanization policy- on the right to the city of marginalized sectors. His current project explores how various institutions work on substance abuse in the urban margins. Kyungmo Chun is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. His research interests include economic sociology, financialization of everyday life, culture, knowledge, and theory. His ongoing project examines how lay investors navigate financial market uncertainty, focusing on South Korean Tesla retail shareholders. He holds a B.A. in Korean Language Education and an M.A. in Sociology, both from Seoul National University. Paulina Cottom is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her broad interests are political and environmental sociology, disasters, habitability, risk, and resistance. Her current research project studies the relationship between categories of (un)habitability and disasters in Guatemala. She holds an MA in Sociology from UT Austin and a BA in Sociology with a minor in Latin American Studies from UTEP. María Ximena Dávila is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. She writes and conducts research on gender, social movements, inequality, reproductive health, and violence in Latin America. Her current research explores how crises—humanitarian, economic, and environmental—shape women’s lives through the lenses of reproduction, motherhood, and family. Noah DiAntonio is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on gender, care work, social policy, and economic sociology. His master’s thesis project explores state caregiving policies and the experiences of family caregivers. He holds a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University. Victoria Dominguez-Edington is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include gender, work, organizations, feminist theory, and inequality. Her current project examines the startup fundraising process. Victoria has worked with startups and investors since 2019. She was featured as a 2025 SXSW Mentor for Startups. Before joining the startup ecosystem, Victoria spent nearly a decade in education as a Director at a local tutoring center. She holds a BA from Southwestern University and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin. Alyssah Gonzalez is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in Sociology. Her research interests are at the intersection of crime and education. Her current work focuses on hyper-policing and surveillance, both within neighborhoods and schools. Alyssah is also a Population Research Center Trainee and a NICHD Fellow. Jaime Hsu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Jaime studies racial and gender/sexual inequality in the context of neighborhood and health. Building upon urban, global, and environmental sociology, Jaime’s ethnographic project focuses on how residential patterns and racial boundaries between Asian immigrants and white Americans shape everyday life and perceived environmental risks in a rural industrial town of the American South. Katarina Huss is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and a graduate trainee in the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests include immigration, citizenship, and identity. She is currently working on research related to multigenerational processes of identity development and inequality in immigrant families. Daniel Krasnicki is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. His interests include surveillance, social movements, policing, and qualitative methods. His current research focuses on how police training impacts use of force and shapes the culture of policing in the United States. He received his B.A. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Allison Lang is a Ph.D student in the Sociology department. Her research interests are broadly the environment, social movements, gender, and Latin America. She is currently working on a project investigating the outcomes of the anti-mining movement in Argentina. She has a B.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Political Science, Spanish, and International Studies from the University of Michigan, in addition to a specialization in Social Policy from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Max Lubell is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and graduate trainee in the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Max is primarily interested in studying community-based alternatives to policing and incarceration. He holds secondary interests in urban sociology, sociology of education, and environmental sociology. Max holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Jasmyne Nelson is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. She holds a B.S in Psychology and B.A in Criminology from the University of Florida. Her research interests surround the consequences of minority youth’s contact with police. Currently, Jasmyne is investigating the biosocial and health consequences of police contact and police violence for Black youth. Jasmyne is a NSF GRFP fellow and Population Research Center Trainee. Águeda Ortega is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests include food politics, bureaucracy and the state, economic sociology, and environmental sociology. Her current research explores the role of the state in the promotion of agroecology in Argentina. Águeda holds a BA in Sociology and Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University and an MA in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Charlotte Perez is a third year PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her primary research interests include youth mental health, the relationship between social ties and health, and healthcare. She holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Sociology and Applied Mathematics from Brown University. Francisco Sánchez is a Venezuelan Ph.D student in the department of Sociology. His research is focused on violence, states, and impacts on subjectivity. Francisco holds a Master’s Degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida. Bradley Silberzahn is a year Graduate Student in the Department of Sociology. Prior to coming to UT Austin, Bradley attended Harford Community College and West Virginia University and worked as a research coordinator at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Previous projects include ethnographic work with police departments, as well as cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies with people who inject drugs and people who sell sex in Baltimore City, Maryland and Huntington, West Virginia. Brad currently works as a graduate research assistant under Dr. Debra J. Umberson. Sercan Tas is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. His research interests include economic sociology, finance, charity giving and university endowments. Sercan holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology from Bogazici University. Aigné Taylor is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Sociology. Her primary research interests aim to explore the social mechanisms that drive maternal mortality and morbidity disparities. Using a Black feminist theoretical approach, she plans to center the healthcare experiences of Black birthing folks. At present, Aigné is examining the impact of shifting and gendered racial microaggressions (GRMS) on Black women’s mental health outcomes. She obtained her B.A. in Political Science and B.A. in Sociology from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University. Aigné is affiliated with the Population Research Center as a Graduate Student Trainee. Chyi-Rong Tsai is a Ph.D student in the Department of Sociology. Her current research focuses on welfare state policies on elderly people in the East Asia context. Rong holds a BS in Atmospheric Sciences from National Taiwan University and a MA in sociology from the University of Texas, Austin. Dorothy Rau is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology, a WGS affiliate, and a graduate fellow at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights. Their research broadly investigates the relationship between queerness and state power. Dorothy was previously a Fulbright scholar and holds an MSc in Gender, Peace and Security from the London School of Economics where they were the Winner of the Best Dissertation Prize. Their current project explores the realities of gender and sexual non-normativity in prisons. Cameron Rua-Smith is a PhD student in the department of sociology. His primary research interests lie in the sociology of education; specifically, the roles that race and ethnicity play in the experiences and engagement of college students. Cameron’s other interests include evaluation research on policy within higher education and university shared governance as they relate to race, ethnicity, and gender. He studied Sociology during his undergraduate career at The University of Arizona and received his Master of Arts degree in Sociology from Arizona State University. Daniela Sanchez Lopez is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, inequality, reproductive labor, and wealth,particularly in Latin America and Mexico. Prior to joining the department, Daniela was a consultant for UN Women Mexico. She holds a BA in Sociology from UNAM, a BA in Communications from ITESM, and an MA in Gender Studies from El Colegio de México. Jackson Walker is a doctoral student in the department of sociology. His research focuses on death experiences and rituals among minoritized communities in the United States. Jackson holds an MA in Asian Studies from UT Austin. Jenna Maree Wong is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on education and disability, with her current work studying student debt disparities by disability status. She holds an MA in Sociology from UT Austin and a BA in Communicative Disorders from California State University, Fullerton. Jenna is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a California State University CDIP Fellow. Carly Young is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on the intersection of sexuality, gender, and contraceptive decision making among young people in the United States. Carly holds a B.A. in sociology with a minor in applied psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an M.A. in sociology from UT Austin. Graduate Affiliates Atalia Israeli-Nevo is a PhD in the Department of Anthropology, exploring queer and social utopias as they unfold through the exploitation and labor of domestic animals. Her fieldwork focuses on queer farmers outside of Berlin (the German state of Brandenburg), and the affect produced through the intimate work with animals, in an age where queerness becomes incorporated and neoliberal, but also adapts and changes as queer people “peripheralize” to rural edges of cities. She is interested in nonhuman subjectivity and violence, human-animal labor, the urban/rural divide, postsocialism and neo-fascism, and has previously published articles about transgender temporality, queer kinships and grief. P. Salomé Valdivieso is currently a Latin American Studies MA student at The University of Texas at Austin. Salomé graduated from Luther College with a triple major in Political Science, International Studies, and Anthropology. She wrote two theses on original research into the experience of Latine Student-Athletes in a PWI, as well as Diaspora Ecuadorian Politics. Her research interests include social movements, political representation, environmental activism, and diaspora politics.
