Biography

Chantiri is a Senior Research Associate at Bright Research Group. She has a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in Chicana/o and Central American Studies. She completed her dissertation, Making Moves In/With/Against the University: The Development of a Politicized Voice in Immigrant Student Organizing. Her dissertation is an interdisciplinary project examining the ways in which institutions and political narratives in social movements are co-constituted. She investigated the ways in which universities have been reconfigured by the immigrant student movement and how institutional response has simultaneously shaped strategies and political narratives in the movement. She did this by examining the immigrant student movement at the University of California from 2000 to 2015, which offers a site to explore logics in the development and institutionalization of immigrant incorporation. Through oral histories, in-depth interviews and archival research, she argued that for immigrant student organizers, universities became contested spaces of both social struggle and institutional incorporation at a time of increased polarization in national immigration rhetoric and policy.