Taft Crowley is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science. His subfield concentrations are political economy and comparative politics. Through these lenses Taft focuses on issues of migration, land reform, demographic imbalances, and the politics of LGBTQ Americans. His current project aims to understand the connection between land reform and migration in Central America. This project hopes to better explain the constraints and choices of potential migrants in the Northern Triangle, with the hope that such work can better inform policy choices in migrant origin and destination states. Taft’s other work has sought to understand the politics resulting from male surpluses in India and changing group solidarity within cis-gay men in the US.

Emily Kracht is an Anthropology graduate student, specializing in Archaeology. Emily studies the Indigenous peoples of the early Caribbean, but has broad interests in ceramic technology, archaeometry, marine adaptations, exchange networks, and outreach. She specifically focuses on archaeometric methods including ceramic analysis, stable isotope analysis, and radiocarbon dating. She uses these techniques to understand migration, colonization, social identity, and exchange of these early peoples. Emily’s current research studies how the elemental composition of pottery can be used to track early exchange and trade networks among regional and microregional centers.

Emily holds a BA and BS in Anthropology and Chemistry, respectively, from the University of Florida (UF). She also has spent time as a lab technician and collections assistant at UF and the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Florida.

Esaú is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara and part of the Population Health in Geography (PHiG) research group. Esaú's broad research interests include immigration, health outcomes, policy, and spatial data and analysis. He received a B.A. in Political Science from CSU Bakersfield in 2018, and a Master in Public Policy from UC Riverside in 2020. During his time at UC Riverside, Esaú’s research focused on developing a survey to measure the effects that pro-immigrant and restrictive policies have on the integration experiences and health outcomes of Latinx immigrants living in California. 

Emily Fox is a PhD student in the department of Sociology with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies. Her research considers how gender (particularly masculinities), ethnoracial identity, socioeconomic class, and sexuality shape friendship experiences. Most recently, she used nationally representative data to show that young adults' reported closeness to their best friend is not only stratified by gender, but also ethnoracial identity. In another on-going project, she employs an original online survey and virtual interviews to explore how undergraduate students understand, experience, and rely on their friendships in the context of COVID-19. Moving forward, she plans to qualitatively investigate how men create, maintain, understand, and benefit from their friendships with each other, paying particular attention to the intersecting roles of race, class, and sexuality.