Shruti Gokhale:
I am pursuing my Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at UCSC and hold a master's degree in social work with a specialization in livelihoods and social entrepreneurship. My research project focuses on indigenous nomadic entertainer communities in India, such as tightrope walkers, snake charmers, and wandering actors, that are hereditary performers. I am interested in examining the entanglements between performance and law in these communities' lived experiences and livelihoods by analyzing how subjective interpretations and implementation of specific laws work differently for stagings on the street and televised versions of those same acts. This double act legitimizes the televised depictions of performances while criminalizing the traditional hereditary performers.
Natali Levin Schwartz: 
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Politics department. I am interested in political and critical social theory and focus on different forms of political action and their relationship to various modes of oppression in contemporary liberal democracies. I study questions of violence, resistance, gender, the relationship between law and activism, and how individuals and groups can use, mobilize, or challenge the legal domain by extralegal means. My dissertation project examines the practice of testimony to sexual violence in the legal sphere and civil society and theorizes the political aspects and prospects of this practice within and outside of the law. I am interested in teaching theory core classes, critical political thought, women and law, and critical legal studies.
Melissa Marini Švigelj: 
Melissa Marini Švigelj is a Cota-Robles fellow in the Education Department’s doctoral program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her co-advisors are Dr. Cindy Cruz and Dr. Ron Glass. She is also an award-winning, retired public high school teacher. Extending upon the advocacy and activism she engaged in during her career as an educator, her scholarship, research, and art engage the entwined vines of healing, educating, storytelling, and method-making. Drawing from anti-colonial and critical studies across disciplines, her research centers on access to educational services for young people being detained in locally-operated adult jails. She also explores how to utilize civil rights legislation to eliminate educational injustice and to dismantle systems designed to extinguish and inter.
Gabriel Saloman Mindel: 
Gabriel Saloman Mindel is an interdisciplinary artist, musician and scholar whose research combines the study of sound and theories of power, particularly the use of noise to extend beyond the limits of the body in struggles for space and political autonomy. His writing has been published in Sounding Out! and The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, as well as numerous arts publications. Mindel received an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts and is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. His dissertation project, Profanity: Performance and the Sovereign Politics of Noise argues for noise’s potential to precipitate radically transformative events in a challenge to the foundational structures of political power which constrain people’s everyday cultural, political and social life.
Wilson Miu: 
I am Wilson Miu, a Ph.D. Candidate from the History Department, and I am writing on marriage practices and local receptions to marriage laws in south China and Hong Kong from 1930 to 1980. My research interests are social history, cultural history, commodities history, and comparative history, and I am teaching a course on Hong Kong and Taiwan in Summer 2021. I am originally from Hong Kong, and I am fascinated by the varieties of legal systems used there, in China, and also in the United States.
