The Latino Social Science Pipeline Iniative at UC Berkekely (LSSPI) currently hosts two postdoctoral scholars pursuing research advancing social scientific knowledge and understanding of the U.S. Latinx communities. They are also committed to student mentorship and expanding the Latinx social science profession and are interested in community-engaged social science research.
Amy Andrea Martinez, PhD
Amy Andrea Martinez is a postdoctoral scholar at the Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley Department of Sociology. She earned her doctoral degree in Criminal Justice from the Criminal Justice Studies Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. Her research interests include Mexican/Chicano Gang Culture, Mass Incarceration, Third World and Indigenous Qualitative Research Methods, U.S. (Settler) Colonialism, Police Use of Lethal Force, and Prison/Police Abolition. As a first-generation, working-class, and system-impacted Xicana from Southern California, her experiences inform her commitment to decolonial gang research on Mexican/Chicanx families and their associations and experiences with gang and street life.
Lorraine Torres-Colon,PhD
Lorraine Torres Colon is a postdoctoral scholar at the Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley Department of Sociology. Dr. Torres Colon is a decolonial feminist sociologist interested in studying health and socioeconomic inequalities. Her research lies at the intersections of race and ethnicity, health, migration, labor, gender, and violence. She is broadly concerned with using quantitative methods to map gendered health and socioeconomic inequalities associated with colonialism, coloniality, and migration within and between former metropoles and the non-sovereign territories they administer. Dr. Torres Colon’s current work spatially analyzing Puerto Rican administrative court and police records contributes to an emerging field of research that understands violence as a public health issue embedded within local and global ecosystems of health, sovereignty, and socioeconomic well-being.
Dr. Torres Colon’s research agenda currently includes three lines of interest: 1) the geospatial patterning of public health issues within non-sovereign territories, 2) the socioeconomic incorporation of colonial racialized subjects and colonial immigrants within high-income current and former metropoles, and 3) theoretical analysis of gendered colonial logics that undergird much of the 20th-century literature surrounding migrants’ incorporation within former empires. Her writing has been published in several journals, including the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and the Annual Review of Sociology. Lorraine holds a PhD in Sociology from The City University of New York, The Graduate Center.