Workshop by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana and Alana Haynes Stein

In this in-person workshop, we will share findings from our research conducted as part of Imagining America’s Leading and Learning Initiative with graduate public scholars at UC Davis. Using this research as a starting point, we will coordinate collaborative thinking on how graduate school can be navigated and reimagined to create an environment where graduate public scholars can thrive.

Our research report goes into depth about UC Davis graduate students’ experiences with public scholarship based on interviews with 31 graduate public scholars and recent UCD alumni. From this, we have outlined how graduate program structures, academic culture, and emotionality impact graduate students’ experiences with public scholarship. 

Through this workshop, we hope to brainstorm how to collectively proceed in shifting the culture and structures of graduate school to better support public scholars. We will host a labeling activity envisioning the public scholar’s toolbox and invite participants to share (if they wish) their own experiences of navigating graduate school as public scholars. We will collaboratively outline a platform for renewing and repairing graduate school structures and culture. Information produced in this platform will be integrated into Imagining America’s ongoing efforts around shifting institutional culture to foster public scholarship.

If you identify as a graduate public scholar, activist, or community-engaged researcher, then this workshop is for you!

About the Facilitators

Alana Haynes Stein is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on food security, nonprofit organizations, poverty, and political economy. Alana’s dissertation focuses on the resources, practices, and decision-making of U.S. food banks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research focuses on understanding how the privatization of food assistance and food bank networks impact access to resources. Alana has also worked with Imagining America to research graduate student experiences with publicly engaged scholarship. 

Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American Literatures and Cultures with a designated emphasis on Human Rights at the University of California, Davis. Her research project focuses on childhood arrival migrants to the United States. She is the recipient of a UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship, Mellon Public Scholars Fellowships, the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory fellowship, and has received awards from Imagining America, the National Humanities Center, and the UC Humanities Research Initiative, among others. She is a researcher for the Humanizing Deportation project, a community-based digital storytelling project and the world’s most robust public qualitative archive that documents the human consequences of contemporary regimes of migration and border control in the United States and Mexico. She is the coordinator of the Playas de Tijuana Mural Project, an interactive mural on the initial point of the westernmost point of the US-Mexico border, which documents the stories of (deported) childhood arrivals through portraiture and digital storytelling. Other digital humanities projects include the Leave No One Behind Mural project and DACAmented: DREAMs Without Borders digital storytelling project. She has been published in The Humanizing Deportation Project: Building a Community Archive of Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge (2022), in Critical Storytelling from the Borderlands. En la linea (2022), and has a forthcoming chapter in Reflexiones coyunturales sobre migraciones contemporáneas en contextos de pandemia (2023).

About Imagining America: The Imagining America (IA) consortium brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues. Guided by our values and by dreaming and building together in public, IA creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.