The Work of Kim Perez

Kim was a woman of boundless energy, a tireless worker - in her academic engagement for her B.A. with honors at Santa Cruz, for her M.A. at the Fletcher School (Tufts University), in the Peace Corps in South Africa, and, perhaps most of all, in her Ph.D. studies at Michigan State.

The many outcomes of her work are reflected best, perhaps, in her resume, created in 2004, where she notes participating in:

• working as a Crisis Intervention Volunteer in Safe Place Shelter at MSU
• interning at the Asia-Pacific Center for Peace and Justice in Washington
• organizing lobbying for the Santa Cruz Student Government
• coordinating Asian Pacific Islander cultural events for Merrill College
• coordinating educational rights for the Asian Pacific Islander Student Association at UC-Santa Cruz
• organizer of a university conference for 50 high school students from Asian-American immigrant communities
• organizer of Asian American students on educational and political issues
• legislative assistant for Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard
• co-developed state-wide Needs Assessment Findings on Filipino Youth
• was a 1997 Public Policy/International Affairs Summer Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University

At Michigan State, her work ethic resulted in an incredible accomplishment in the Department of Sociology. In 2004 Kim changed her directions, moved from political science to sociology as a discipline, a field she never had studied. Admitted to the Ph.D. program, she switched her focus from South Africa to political sociology of change in Islamic West Africa, increased her focus on women and gender issues in development and on the impact of religion and ethnicity. She began to intensively study Hausa language for research in Northern Nigeria, taking intensive courses in the summer as well as at MSU.

In those 24 months before she left for her research in Nigeria in early 2006, she had completed all sociology Ph.D. seminar and methods requirements, taken three-years equivalent of Hausa language, visited West Africa to identify a research site and African collaborators, planned and passed her comprehensive examinations, obtained her human subjects permission and Nigerian research visa, written four research proposals for national competitions (winning three of them), and visited friends in Europe!