Intern Scholars
Learn more about the Intern Scholar Program
2013 Intern Scholars
Luis Flores
Luis is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with undergraduate degrees in Political Economy and History. His academic interests include postcolonialism, international development, the political economy of higher education, and institutional change. His writing has been published in the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, the Berkeley Political Review, the Daily Californian, and the Berkeley Planning Journal. A recipient of the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize, Luis will spend the 2013-14 school year along the US-Mexico border exploring the relationship between transnational credit dependence, Mexican structural adjustment, and immigration policy in the context of the Great Recession.
Luis is committed to producing research that not only addresses the needs of the marginalized but is also generated with these communities.
Jettie Word
Jettie recently graduated from the London School of Economics and Sciences Po, Paris, where she received a Masters of Public Administration in Sustainable and International Development. Her academic research focused on land-use policy and took her to Mexico City, where she studied the complexities of agriculture and ecological conservation in a sprawling urban setting. Jettie has also studied domestic agricultural issues, and produced extensive research on the U.S. Farm Bill.
Jettie is interested in global and local trends in agriculture and conservation, and how the complexities of globalization interact with local initiatives.
2012 Intern Scholars
Tami Etziony
Tami Etziony is an undergraduate Environmental Studies student at Mills College. She will continue in the Masters in Public Policy program in 2012-13. Her academic goal is defining and establishing sustainable economic methods, mainly for eliminating human exploitation and resource depletion.
She is involved with local and state political and environmental campaigns. Her interests combine social and environmental issues with the objective of empowering local communities.
Tami’s life experience in gardening and business leads her to explore the use of native local plants as a tool for environmental revitalization, which encourages native fauna. She led construction projects building living native structure in the Mills College botanical garden.
2011 Intern Scholars
Agazit Abate
Agazit received her BA in International Development Studies and MA in African Studies from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her academic interests included African cinema, cultural production, and narratives of resistance. She currently works at UCLA's Center for World Languages in the International Institute and is a research associate for an urban agriculture non-profit in Los Angeles.
Her areas of interest include food sovereignty, farmers’ rights, land rights and land grab, climate change, sustainable development and social justice.
Caroline Bergdolt
Caroline completed nearly 10 years of business-to-business research in the US and France. She is now pursuing her interests in social and environmental justice. She is currently completing a Master’s in Cultural and Social Anthropology at CIIS in San Francisco. Her academic work focuses on environmental injustice and biodiversity loss, especially in the context of land grabs from traditional/ indigenous farmers. She has spent time in the field, building alliances and conducting research in both the West Bank and Ecuador.
Areas of interest: globalization, land rights and displacement, small-scale agriculture, indigenous rights, climate change, and biodiversity.
Grace Phillips
Grace Phillips is a Morehead Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is pursuing an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Environmental Geography with focus on theories of value, knowledge, existence, as well as spatial distribution patterns of biota. She hopes to unite these disciplines in her interest in conceptions of land use and ownership and it's translation into resource management policy.
Grace has spent time working with indigenous and impoverished populations in Guatemala, Madagascar, Mongolia and North Carolina. These experiences inform her interests in globalization, autonomy, food sovereignty, climate change, sustainable food systems, and international trade.
