Uriel Serrano

Saludos!

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I am a sociologist whose research and teaching interests are located in the sociology of race, gender, and masculinity, children and youth, social movements, and education and engage three broad areas: critical carceral studies; intersectionality; and critical youth studies. I’m particularly interested in how carceral systems and logics function, persist, and are challenged, and how experiences differ across social contexts and social locations.

I am currently an American Sociological Association Minority Fellow, a CSU Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program Fellow, and a past AAHHE Graduate Fellow. My past work includes a campus racial climate study at a Hispanic Serving Institution in the California State University system. Recognition for my scholarship includes funding and awards from the Social Science Research Council, Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, Project MALES at the University of Texas at Austin, the Research Center for the Americas at UC Santa Cruz, and the UC Santa Cruz Blum Center.

I have co-created community based participatory research projects with youth organizations in Los Angeles and the Student Success Equity Research Center at UCSC. By involving members of the community at multiple levels, and incorporating and validating multiple sources of knowledge, these projects have centered addressing the well-being of college students and youth of color. As such, I have mentored and trained first-generation college students and high school students as researchers. I do this work in an attempt to break away from the usual power dynamics between researcher and “subjects of research.”