Amy A. Martinez
Student Fellow
Amy A. Martinez is a first-generation Xicana from southern California and currently a doctoral candidate in the Criminal Justice Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. Her dissertation examines the intersections among U.S. settler-colonial ideology and contemporary constructions of race, carcerality, and how that affects the hyper-policing and targeting of Mexican/Chicano gang members in Santa Barbara, California. Her research interests broadly include Mexican/Chicano Gang Culture; Juvenile/Criminal legal systems; Urban Ethnography; Mass Incarceration; Third World & Indigenous Qualitative Research Methods; U.S. (settler) colonialism; Police use of lethal force; Prison & Police Abolition.
Participating Years
2021–2022
Agrarian Questions, Urban Connections, and Planetary Possibilities: Fire, Water, Earth and Air
The material conditions of agrarian life are deeply connected to the political, social, economic, environmental and cultural challenges of contemporary existence at a planetary scale. Agrarian spaces are central to geopolitical disputes over land and other natural resources, and rural social movements play a key role in defending biodiversity and food production.