Graduate Student Directory

Biography, Education and Training

Karina Ruiz is a doctoral student in Latin American and Latino Studies. She engages with Childhood Studies and Family Studies in the context of Latino mixed-status families. She came to UCSC form CSU Monterey Bay, where she was a McNair Scholar and Sally Cassanova Predoctoral Scholar. She comes from an interdisciplinary undergraduate program and continues to think across the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Her dissertation looks at children's emotional labor and care work in mixed-status and transnational families.

Karina has developed her teaching and pedagogy as a CITL (Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning) Fellow. She served as the department's Lead TA and conducted a workshop on the role of vulnerability in teaching and learning spaces. Karina has also worked as a graduate coordinator for 2 years of the We Belong Project, a collaborative and community-engaged research project. She has trained undergraduates on interviewing, and led a data collection team to conduct interviews virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic. Karina has also mentored undergraduates at UCSC and San Jose Community College on individual research projects, supported by the Koret Scholars program and UCSC/SJCC HSI Cultivamos Excelencia project.

She is accountable to immigrant communities, specifically children and women.