Fall 2022 Small Grants Recipients

Enna Chen (she/they) is a first-year PhD student at the Stanford Life-Span Development Laboratory in the Department of Psychology. She is advised by Professor Laura L. Carstensen. Broadly speaking, Enna’s research interests include aging, prosocial behavior, emotion, and intergenerational relationships. With the generous support from Stanford PACS, Enna is excited to explore strategies based on research about motivation and aging that encourage philanthropic giving among adults across the lifespan. 

Katie Clayton is a PhD candidate in political science. She studies public opinion and political behavior, with an emphasis on democratic norms, the politics of race and ethnicity, and immigration politics in both the United States and abroad. Her research has been published or is forthcoming at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Political Science Research and Methods, and Political Behavior, among others, and has received coverage in a variety of major media outlets. Her book, Campus Diversity: The Hidden Consensus, was recently published at Cambridge University Press.

Matt DeButts is a PhD student in Communication and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. A former Beijing-based journalist from 2014-2019, Matt is interested in how government and media institutions shape public beliefs, especially in the context of fast-moving or high-uncertainty stories and rumors. His current research projects explore the effect of remote reporting on news production, the possibility of using foreign languages to evade censorship, and the adaptation of propaganda to new media platforms. Matt holds a B.A. in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought from Amherst College, and an M.A. in China Studies from Peking University. His journalistic work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Vox, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.

Chris Flores is a political science PhD student broadly interested in political behavior and race and ethnicity. Chris’ research has focused on the role of racial threat and racialized campaign messages in shaping public opinion. Currently, they seek to capture the complexity of Latino racial identities beyond panethnic identity through interviews and analysis of nationally representative survey data. Chris is affiliated with the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford and holds an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University.

Emilia Groupp is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on the development of utility-scale solar energy sites, transnational energy infrastructures and new energy geographies. She has carried out long-term ethnographic research with several transnational renewable energy developers as part of her doctoral dissertation research, as well as collaborative research with stakeholders. Her current research examines the relationship between grassroots political organizing and renewable energy development and the social relations that underlie the development of utility-scale renewable energy sites. She also works on a number of projects to expand open access research and data. 

Krystal Laryea is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of education. Her research draws on cultural and organizational sociology to address a fundamental question: how are communities and institutions built across lines of difference? In the face of widespread political polarization, rising inequalities, growing mental health crises, and the decline of liberal democracies, one of the central tasks for sociology is to offer insights on the possibilities for inclusion and integration, cohesion and solidarity without the elimination of difference. As an ethnographer, I examine the micro-level, interactional foundations of culture, institutions, and civil society through long-term participant observation in religious communities, universities, and nonprofits. My work can be found in American Sociological Review, Mobilization, the Journal of Higher Education, and Global Perspectives. 

Marijn Nura Mado is a PhD candidate in Communication at Stanford University. Her research examines media literacy education at scale. She uses ethnographic methods to explore the practices and epistemological assumptions underlying media literacy interventions that span across cultural and linguistic borders. Marijn holds an MA in Sociology from The New School for Social Research and a BA in Liberal Arts & Sciences from the University of Amsterdam.