Annie’s dissertation focuses on the National Union of the Homeless and the struggle for urban land in the late 20th century United States. She analyzes the political power of homeless people within the US in the context of landless people’s movements across the Global South. Her research on the long history of unhoused people’s political movements stems directly from her work as an organizer of homeless people today.

As an interdisciplinary scholar she positions her work at the intersections of Ethnic Studies, Central American Studies, Critical Human Geography, Critical University Studies, and Public Humanities.

She received her Bachelor’s Degrees in Chicana/o Studies and Geography from UCLA. Her dissertation, Displaced Kinship: A Politics of Belonging Among Central American Students, explores how children of Central American immigrants inherit and draw from legacies of displacement to articulate their identities, develop a political consciousness, and navigate higher education. Drawing from 40 interviews with students, she proposes a theoretical framework she names “displaced kinship” to demonstrate how Central American students refuse the disenfranchisement that displacement creates for their families and in this refusal develop a form of belonging.

As an intern with the National Park Service, Ellie conducted oral histories and wrote several articles for their website. The articles range from highlighting disabled visitors’ feedback forms at Yosemite National Park to comparing three guidebooks written by and for disabled visitors, and more. Additionally, Ellie is interested in the integration of disability stories and themes into K-12 curriculums. She has worked for the Library of Congress and the California History-Social Science Project on this endeavor.

Ellie earned her M.A. in history from Syracuse University and her B.S. from Cornell University.

Her dissertation explores historical and present-day relationships to wildfire as a window into land relations. Through analysis of historical documents, her research examines how land, labor, and fire are co-constructed under settler colonialism in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Partnering with FireGeneration Collaborative, her dissertation also engages young people in collaborative listening circles to envision their futures working and living with fire.

Meredith has a B.S. in Forestry from UC Berkeley and an M.S. in Forest Ecosystems and Society from Oregon State University.  Her background working in land management motivates her to pursue community-engaged scholarship that disrupts settler colonial power and promotes environmental justice.

She has been an Affiliate Scholar at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the Curatorial and Editorial Manager of the Social Study of Disappearance Lab at Columbia. She is also a poet. She volunteers with Poetic Justice, where she writes in community with women incarcerated in Oklahoma.