Fall 2020/Spring 2021 LSC Emphasis

The sixth cohort includes eight students, representing schools from across UCI:

Meghan Ballard
Adviser: Kaaryn Gustafson

Meghan Ballard is a PhD Student in Criminology, Law and Society. She worked for the United States Department of Justice for nearly a decade where she served on trial teams prosecuting white collar crimes, investigated civil rights claims involving Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and provided language access-related technical assistance to law enforcement agents, court administrators, and correctional staff. As a researcher, she endeavors to leverage critical scholarship to identify and promote policy discussions concerning barriers to justice. In particular, she is interested in harnessing social science research to better document national origin discrimination in the form of language (in)accessibility to the United States' criminal justice system.

Adviser: Damien Sojoyner

Sydney Martin is a law student passionate about the intersection of race, law, and education. She currently takes classes that focus on public interest law and policy making. She is particularly interested in examining the treatment of K-12 public education entities towards disabled students, incarcerated students, and low-income students of color. 

Vicente Celestino Mata
Adviser: Sameer Ashar

Vicente Celestino Mata is a doctoral student in the department of Criminology, Law and Society, where he examines the impacts of immigration law and policy, and immigration court procedures on decision-making processes in deportation, asylum-seeking, and other temporary relief cases. More specifically, his research considers the political climate and its influence on shaping the political and legal ideology of immigration judges. His research aims to better understand the way in which the larger system of the immigration industrial complex contributes to racial and social inequality.

Allyson Myers
Adviser: Mary McThomas

Ally Myers is a JD candidate in the School of Law. Her research interests involve examining the relationship between property and citizenship through the lens of the myriad ways the law delineates the spaces of existence for individuals experiencing homelessness. In pursuing this line of inquiry, she aims to provide insights both into addressing the increasingly urgent crisis of homelessness as well as broader implications for extending citizenship rights to marginalized groups, who all share the experience of unequal access to property.

Quyên Nguyen-Le
Adviser: Sora Han

Quyên Nguyen-Le is a filmmaker and PhD student in the Visual Studies program. Their research interests revolve around cinema, transnational labor, globalization and migration, critical refugee studies, and circulation of military technology. By centering refugees in the study of media, Quyên hopes to engage not with content and representation within the medium, but with the material and legal processes that construct trans/national settler-colonial infrastructures that culminate in the production, dissemination, and consumption of these media projects in the global sphere.

Katie Raitz
Adviser: Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan

Katie Raitz is a rising third-year law student. She is an Environmental Law Fellow and is engaged in activism and scholarship at the intersections of race, environmental degradation, and climate change. Her project critically examines the use of the term “environmental justice” to describe communities of color in the United States. She will compare environmental activists’ use of the term with how it is used by lawyers and policymakers.

Amruta Trivedi
Adviser: Ana Muñiz

Amruta Trivedi is a JD student in the School of Law. Her research interests involve using empirical and legal research methods to examine relationships between immigration enforcement and criminal law, and using law to support social movements.

Maggie Woodruff
Adviser: Simon Leung

Maggie Woodruff is a law student and PhD student in Anthropology. Her work focuses on questions of shared space and equitable access. She is particularly interested in the way environmental justice and legal access issues are compounded when people experience homelessness, and what that demonstrates about our imagined scales of community care and healthy environments.