Kathleen Blee
Distinguished Professor Kathleen Blee studies both micro-processes of social interaction and the dynamics of violent white supremacist movements. She is currently finishing a book with Robert Futrell and Pete Simi on the acceleration of racial extremism in the U.S.
Joshua Bloom
Joshua Bloom is Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, and Director of the Social Movements Lab in Sociology at University of Pittsburgh. He studies the dynamics of insurgent practice and social transformation. Bloom’s research on social movements, race, and labor has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and other venues. His books include Black against Empire: the History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2016), which won the American Book Award; Working for Justice: the LA Model of Organizing and Advocacy (Cornell University Press, 2010); Freedom! (Levine Querido, 2022); and most recently Contested Legitimacy in Ferguson: Nine Hours on Canfield Drive (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before earning a PhD, Bloom spent many years as an anti-racist organizer. Keywords: Social Movements, Race, Labor, Insurgent Practice.
Nadia E. Brown
Nadia E. Brown is a professor of Government and the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University. Professor Brown is the author of the award-winning Sisters in the Statehouse: Black women and Legislative Decision Making. She is the co-author of 2022 Ralph Bunche Book award, Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites with Danielle Lemi. Keywords: intersectionality, Black women’s politics, Black women’s politics, legislative studies, candidates and elections, political behavior.
Lisa D. Brush
Lisa D. Brush (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993), holds appointments as Professor of Sociology and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA, where she chairs the Sociology department. Her first book, Gender and Governance, documents and explains the ways contemporary capitalist workfare states and social polices produce, position, and police women and men as naturally different and unequal, and the ways gender difference and inequality organize North Atlantic states and social policies. Her second book, Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy, investigates what happens when “work/family conflict” becomes literal; how men’s control, coercion, and sabotage trap women in poverty and abuse; and the failure of women’s waged work to end poverty and abuse. Current collaborations evaluate violence prevention programs, promote intersectional, gender transformative, anti-racist, and anti-carceral organizing to end campus sexual assault, and investigate gender as a principle of the social organization of research, advocacy, and policy in a variety of cases. Keywords: gender, intersectionality, states and social policies, abolition feminisms.
YASIR kHAN
Muhammad Yasir Khan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. He did his Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Yasir’s research lies at the intersection of development economics, behavioral economics, and political economy. He has worked on incentives and motivations of bureaucrats and politicians in Pakistan. Keywords: Development Economics, Incentives of workers.
Mariely López-Santana
Mariely López-Santana is an Associate Professor at George Mason University. Dr. López-Santana received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan and her BA from the University of Puerto Rico. Prior to joining George Mason University, she was Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Dr. López-Santana’s research and teaching interests focus on comparative politics of advanced democracies, federalism, welfare states, and social policies. Her research has appeared in a variety of venues, including Publius, Journal of European Public Policy, SUNY Press, and Journal of Social Policy. Keywords: Federalism, Multilevel Governance, Welfare States, Puerto Rican debate.
José Ciro Martínez
José Ciro Martínez is Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. He was previously Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. José's research explores the politics of food, welfare, drugs and political authority in the Middle East and North Africa, drawing on archival and ethnographic methods. He is committed to modes of political inquiry attentive to the seemingly ordinary and mundane. Building on more than a year working as a baker in the Jordanian capital, Amman, José’s first book, States of Subsistence, wrestles with theories of performativity to dissect the ways in which welfare provision (in the form of food) works to entrench the state in everyday life. Keywords: Comparative Politics; Middle East and North Africa; Ethnography; State Theory.
Angie N. Ocampo-Roland
Angie N. Ocampo-Roland is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research examines the social and political incorporation of racial and ethnic minorities, with a particular focus on the heterogeneity of the Latina/o/x population in the United States. Ocampo-Roland’s work compares multiple viewpoints, examining Latina/o/x political attitudes as well as those of White and Black Americans. Her current projects examine where Latinas/os/xs fit into conceptualizations of who is an American, as well as gender and class identities within the Latina/o/x community. Ocampo-Roland received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. Keywords: Latina/o/x politics, racial/ethnic politics, political behavior/psychology, political sociology.
Erica Owen
Erica Owen is an associate professor and associate dean at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously, she was an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Zurich and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the politics and economics of trade, global production, and automation, with an emphasis on the economic well-being and political influence of workers and firms. She has published in leading policy and political science journals, including the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Politics, and Political Science Research Methods. Keywords: political economy, globalization, labor, multinational firms, automation.
Heidi Reynolds-Stenson
Heidi Reynolds-Stenson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Colorado State University Pueblo and received her doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of Arizona in 2018. She has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative methods and has published several articles focused on social movements, protest, policing, and related topics. Her first book, Cultures of Resistance: Collection Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age (Rutgers University Press) was published in 2022.
Candice C. Robinson
Candice C. Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She earned her Sociology degrees from Hampton University (BA), University of Iowa (MA), and University of Pittsburgh (PhD). Dr. Robinson’s research agenda is motivated by a commitment to understanding the intersections of race and class through the responsibilities and contributions of the Black Middle Class, Black Elite, and Black celebrities to American society generally. Her current project uncovers the history and impact of the National Urban League Young Professionals in support of social change (including Black Lives Matter) in the 2010s. Keywords: Black American and African Diasporic experiences (race), Black Middle Class, social class, civic engagement, philanthropic mobilization.
Melissa Rogers
Melissa Rogers is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Claremont Graduate University and Co-Director of the Inequality and Policy Research Center. Her research focuses on how the spatial distribution of the economy impacts politics. She publishes in the fields of political geography, comparative political economy, Latin American politics, American politics, and political methodology. Her research has been featured in the Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Regional Studies, among others, and she has three books, including two with Cambridge University Press. She earned her Ph.D. and MA from the University of California, San Diego, and BA from Brown University.
Jackie Smith
Jackie Smith is professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, and her work addresses questions about how people and communities respond to problems arising from economic inequality and globalization, and how they engage with global human rights norms and institutions to promote change. She is engaged as an organizer and facilitator in the growing global human rights cities movement, and she works with activists in Pittsburgh and other cities around the U.S. and world. Her current work focuses on the right to housing and on racial equity, and she has been working to help local organizers and policymakers make better use of global human rights treaties and review processes to promote and protect human rights in cities. Smith teaches courses on globalization and health, urban sociology, social movements, and coalitions. She has compiled a dataset on transnational social movements from the 1950s through 2000s, and is author or co-author of numerous works on global and local social movements, including Social Movements and World-System Transformation, Social Movements in the World-System, and Social Movements for Global Democracy. From 2012-2020, she served as editor-in-chief of the open access Journal of World-Systems Research. Smith is co-founder and coordinator of Pittsburgh’s Human Rights City Alliance and serves on the national steering committee of the U.S. Human Rights Cities Alliance.
Fernando Tormos-Aponte
Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and a Kendall Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cambridge. He earned his MA and Ph.D. in Political Science from Purdue University, West Lafayette, and a BA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico—Río Piedras. Dr. Tormos-Aponte specializes in environmental and racial justice, intersectional solidarity, identity politics, social policy, and transnational politics. Tormos-Aponte’s research is situated in two areas of inquiry. Inspired by the devastating toll that hurricanes Irma and María had on his native Puerto Rico, Tormos-Aponte investigates civil society claims about the uneven government response across communities. His work in this area examines the causes and consequences of government neglect of socially vulnerable communities during disaster recovery. Tormos-Aponte’s work also investigates how marginalized groups organize to address their societal needs. He seeks to understand the drivers and consequences of building solidarity across social group differences and how social movements develop an intersectional organizing approach. Keywords: intersectionality, intersectional solidarity, climate justice, Black Lives Matter, Puerto Rico.
Mayra Vélez Serrano
Mayra Vélez Serrano earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University at Buffalo. She has taught at University at Buffalo and Buffalo State College and currently teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. Her research and teaching interests include comparative politics, regional integration, public opinión and social media. She is co-founder of Puerto Rican Public Opinion Lab (PRPol), the only academic institution collecting high quality public opinion data in Puerto Rico. She is co-founder of the Minority Graduate Placement Program (MIGAP), a pipeline program for undergraduate political science students from the University of Puerto Rico, a Minority Serving Institution (MSI), interested in applying to political science PhD programs. Her work can be found in Political Research Quaterly, PS: Politics and Political Science, World Review of Political Economy, Revista Ámbitos de Encuentro, Revista de Relaciones Internacionales, and Caribbean Studies. She is a contributor for El Nuevo Día and Radio Universidad. Keywords: Social media and social movements, regional integration, politics of non-independent territories, Puerto Rican politics.