Julissa Ventura ’10, a Ph.D. student in the department of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, recently received the 2014 Jean Anyon Award For Outstanding Graduate Student Paper from the Grassroots Community and Youth Organizing Special Interest Group within the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The award, which was presented at AERA’s national meeting in Philadelphia in early April, recognized her master’s research, “Constructing Spaces of Belonging in the New Latino Diaspora: An Ethnographic Case Study of a Latino Youth Group.” The selection committee was “particularly impressed by [her] work, which presents original material about Latino youth organizing in a new destination, a Midwestern city.”

Julissa will continue to work with Latino youth and families in new destination areas of the Midwest and hopes to engage with youth in a participatory-action research project as part of her dissertation work.