REGISTER
Colonial legacies continue to shape political, social, and intellectual life. While colonialism is often treated as a historical period, its structures and logics persist in contemporary debates around race, territory, knowledge, and power. This panel brings together UC Berkeley graduate students from anthropology, geography, and sociology to examine how colonial histories are reproduced, contested, and reimagined across different contexts.
The panel will feature Anna Feign, PhD Student in Sociology, Andrea Lara-Garcia, PhD Candidate in Geography, and Sophia Perez, PhD Candidate in Geography. Samera Esmeir, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, will moderate.
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Geography, Anthropology, and Sociology.
Panelists
Anna Feign (Palmer) is a PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research examines the convergence of extractivism, (post)colonial development, and the climate crisis through a qualitative and spatial lens. She is a 2025-2026 Mentored Research Award Fellow and a Global Democracy Commons Fellow. She is a co-founder of the Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley and a member of the Anti-Colonial Democracy Lab. Anna holds a BA in sociology from Occidental College and earned her MA in sociology from UC Berkeley.
Andrea Lara-García is a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. A graduate of the University of Arizona, she studies the relationship between private property and state territoriality in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Historical Society, Bancroft Library Fellowship, and Mentored Research Award.
Sophia Perez is a Chamorro filmmaker, a doctoral student in UC Berkeley’s Geography department, and a co-founder of the Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective. Her research focuses on militarization in the Pacific, particularly the U.S. military presence in the Mariana Islands. She’s also interested in indigenous, community-based filmmaking and is currently directing Tip of the Spear, a documentary short funded by Pacific Islanders in Communications.
Samera Esmeir
(moderator) is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of legal and political thought, Middle Eastern history and colonial and post-colonial studies. Her central intellectual focus thus far has been to examine how late-modern colonialism, with a particular focus on the Middle East, has introduced liberal juridical logics and grammars that in turn shaped modalities of political praxis, and how those have persisted in the post-colonial era and have traveled in different countries in the Middle East. Her first book, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (2012, Stanford University Press), pursues this problem in relation to colonial Egypt and examines how colonial juridical powers have reconfigured the concept of the human during the late-modern colonial era by bonding the human to the law. She is currently working on a second book project also guided by the intersectionality of law and politics. The project examines the encounter between revolutions and different legal traditions (including International law) since the eighteenth century, and traces the shifting legal sensibilities, and the legal theories informing them, to revolutions. In addition, she is working on a number of essays that focus on Palestine as a site for rethinking some concepts central to legal and political thought.
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