Cole Haddock and Maria Toldi (2025)
Encampment sweeps have become the predominant method of managing homelessness across the East Bay, significantly intensifying following the 2024 Supreme Court ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. These sweeps profoundly disrupt lives, destroying critical survival resources, severing community bonds, and inflicting lasting trauma. Despite their increased frequency and lasting consequences, the scope, methods, and human impact of these sweeps remain largely invisible and inadequately documented. Swept Off the Map addresses this critical gap by creating a publicly accessible, comprehensive database and interactive digital story map that documents encampment […]
Christina Ruppert (2025)
Christina’s project emerges from her two-year empirical study, which illuminates the transformative effects of treatment courts—also known as collaborative courts—on judges, public defenders, and district attorneys. In this alternative legal landscape, professionals must adopt behaviors that conflict with their adversarial routines. Legal practitioners are now required to employ practices centered on positive reinforcement, social inclusion, family restoration, and proactive accountability. These courtrooms depart from traditional notions of penal philosophy and instead view justice as a shared community responsibility. Law school’s train students to focus on formality, legal linguistics, and authority, […]
Shreya Chaudhuri (2025)
The Equi-Tea Project puts my thesis research on Indigenous agroforestry into action by restoring ecological and economic justice within Assam’s tea industry. Through a three-pronged approach, I will expand my Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) archive into a farmer-accessible resource, build a collective for knowledge-sharing and agroforestry transition, and launch Chai for Change—a sustainable, farmer-led tea brand connecting Assam to global markets. Rooted in six generations of family tea farming and informed by fieldwork, this project uplifts Indigenous science, supports community sovereignty, and transforms exploitative supply chains into regenerative ones—restoring farmers’ […]
Eythana Miller (2025)
Heritage in Translation documents the language and cultural heritage of the Amish community in Libby, Montana. The project focuses first on how this particular community has navigated the shift from Amish traditionalism to a more modern lifestyle, while maintaining many of their customs and holding onto the Amish identity in significant ways. The other project goal is to document and preserve the Pennsylvania Dutch language in the region through an extensive oral history archive, as it is under-documented and linguistic research on it is limited. The Amish have a fascinating […]