Giovanna Itzel is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Irvine, with graduate emphases in Chicano/Latino studies and feminist studies. Her research asks how immigration-impacted Latino college students define and participate in political life and argues that conventional measures often invisibilize this population in their answers. She offers the framework survival-based politics as an answer: a framework in which political engagement is necessitated by continuous threat rather than mobilized by episodic opportunity. Her dissertation builds the case through community-engaged, mixed-methods research conducted alongside the students whose lives it describes. Her work has appeared in Sociological Perspectives, the Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, and the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, among others, and has been supported by the UC HSI Doctoral Diversity Initiative, the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship, and the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, among others. She used the Latino Fund Scholarship to attend the 2026 APSA Annual meeting where she presented her first empirical dissertation chapter.
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