The UNDOCU Stories Team

 

Lyana Sun Han Chang is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at Penn State. She was born in Huacho, Peru and moved to the suburbs of Chicago at a young age. Her experiences growing up with an undocumented status motivated her to do collaborative and action-oriented research with immigrants. Her dissertation research focuses on the relationships between immigrant identities, immigrant reclaimant narratives, and mainstream discourses on immigration within the context of undocumented status. Lyana is interested in stance-taking and positioning in narratives to understand how immigrants negotiate identities and index public discourses which are often tied to the criminalization and racialization of immigrants. Her research has implications for the inclusion of narratives and identities which are often silenced and constrained by dominant discourses, and for immigration reform.

Lyana is currently developing an UNDOCU Storytelling Webinar Series for Community and Representation, funded by the GADI Graduate Voices in Diversity and Inclusion Grant and Co-sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute and Social Sciences Research Institute. She has also been awarded a Superior Teaching and Research (Star) Award for her project to create virtual repository to house diverse and minoritized immigrant-created reclaimant narratives.

 
Romi is a second-year graduate student in the MA/PhD Hispanic Linguistics program and an NSF-NRT Graduate Research Traineeship fellow.  She was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States at the age of 15 when she was a Sophomore in highschool. English is her second language and Portuguese is her third. She is a passionate educator and philanthropist with an extensive history of leadership roles, community service, teaching, and volunteering work. She is also an activist, scholar and advocate for immigrant rights and access to education in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. Her current research interests include Spanish as a heritage language in the US, specifically morphosyntactic variation across generations and the different dialects of Spanish.

 
Daniel Calzadillas-Rodriguez is a PhD student in Philosophy. His areas of interest are political philosophy, social epistemology, and the history of Latin American philosophy. In particular, his research concerns the limits of liberalism in relation to noncitizens. He is interested in how specific but contested definitions of citizenship and democracy justify coerced legal subjects such as the “illegal immigrant.” Daniel is also interested in the ways in which the material coercion of the body may be directly related to its epistemic subjugation. His concern more broadly lies with how we collectively come to understand the dominance of an Anglo/Eurocentric political order and how a decolonial epistemology might offer resistance to it. These inquiries bring him to a third interest in the development of Latin American philosophy and its relation to Anglo/European thought.

 
A.B. is a queer Quechua and Peruvian first-generation immigrant. Prior to working at Penn State, they served as a youth development facilitator and advisor for the Sadie Nash Leadership Institute and NJ SEEDS. A.B. is also an AmeriCorps VISTA alum. They served as the Community Partnerships and Volunteer Coordinator for the Puerto Rican Action Board (PRAB), a human services non-profit organization in Central New Jersey. During their service year, they created campaigns geared towards promoting food security and multilingual literacy across Middlesex County. As a researcher, A.B. worked for the Observatoire Citoyen de l’Action des Pouvoirs Publics en Haïti (OCAPH), a Haitian citizen watchdog organization, as well as, Réseau Siggil Jigéen (RSJ), an NGO that works to promote and protect women’s rights in Senegal. More recently, they worked with the Library of Congress on expanding their Andean Studies archives in partnership with Andean storytellers, activists, artists, and scholars. A.B. credits GW’s multicultural community for cultivating a strong sense of belonging for them during their undergraduate career and hopes they can reciprocate that support and care for Penn State students with diverse identities and needs.