PEOPLE AT THE INSTITUTE
Deborah Freedman Lustig is a cultural anthropologist whose research has focused on gender and education in the United States and Kenya, where she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2004-5. Lustig earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her articles about teenage mothers have been published in the journals Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Childhood and in the new book Childhood, Youth, and Social Work in Transformation: Implications for Policy and Practice (Columbia University Press, 2009). Lustig is a Research Associate and the Graduate Training Coordinator at the Center on Culture, Immigration, and Youth Violence Prevention, a project of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. She serves as Project Director of the Youth Experiences of Neighborhood Change project, researching how young adults come of age in the San Antonio neighborhood of Oakland, during a period of rapid change.
David Minkus has been a Research Associate and Coordinator of the Graduate Fellows training program at the Center for the Study of Social Change for more than two decades. He earned his Ph.D in Sociology from UC Berkeley. He has worked over the past fifteen years in research, training and consultant positions for a variety of projects and programs involved in program design and process and outcome evaluations of programs targeting at-risk youth in K-12 and post-secondary education settings. He recently completed a year long study of “Best Practices among Youth Serving Programs in Berkeley,” with support from The Berkeley Alliance. He has also worked as a consultant to the California Wellness Foundation on strategies for involving youth as partners in the evaluation of health and violence prevention programs. He also worked in 1998-99 as part of a research team for The California Endowment (TCE) on developing concepts and models on research and clinical practice in multicultural health. He is currently engaged in preliminary research on access to employment and training within the informal economies of Latino ethnic enclaves. This work focuses upon entry level and skilled workers in the construction trades and wood products industries.
Christine Trost is Assistant Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. She also serves as Project Director of ISSC’s Political Socialization in Mixed-status Immigrant Families Project (with Irene Bloemraad, Assistant Professor of Sociology), and Program Director of ISSC’s Center for the Comparative Study of Right-wing Movements. In addition to developing new research initiatives related to the study of social change, Trost organizes ISSI sponsored conferences and events and leads the second year of the Graduate Fellows Training Program. Trost earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley (2000). Trost has written journal articles and edited volumes on topics related to political ethics, campaign practices and civic and political engagement, including co-authoring (with Irene Bloemraad) “It’s a Family Affair: Intergenerational Mobilization in the Spring 2006 Protests,” American Behavioral Scientists (December 2008); co-editing (with Alison Gash) Conflict of Interest and Public Life: Cross-National Perspectives (Cambridge 2008); and co-authoring (with Matthew Grossmann) Win the Right Way: How to Run Effective Local Campaigns in California (Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2005). In 2008 Trost received the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award for her work as a member of the Berkeley Initiative for Leadership and Diversity Steering Committee.