Her dissertation investigates the origins and persistence of segregated pregnancy care in the U.S. Using legal and historical methods, she traces how segregation by race and class was created and sustained from Jim Crow through the Civil Rights era; how it was reconfigured through the design of the Medicaid program and reinforced through health care financing; and how medical education contributes to the normalization of segregated care.

Jennifer’s qualitative research focuses on perinatal care at two university medical centers: one using a traditional model that assigns Medicaid patients to resident-run clinics, and a second that adopted a payer-integrated model, blinding insurance at intake. Through interviews and fieldwork, she explores how providers and trainees experience these different models.

Jennifer holds a J.D. from UC Law SF and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. She co-founded the California Abortion Alliance and served as its Director from 2007 to 2021.

Daniela researches the history of trans and gender diverse people of color in the twentieth century United States. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of LGBTQ history, labor and working-class politics, and Black and Brown liberation movements.

Based on extensive research in the archives of criminalization of New York City and oral histories with trans and gender nonconforming people of color, Valdes’s dissertation offers a grassroots social history of working-class Black and Brown gender diverse New Yorkers from the Great Migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans at midcentury to the early twenty-first century. Her dissertation is a working-class history that broaches forms of survival and resistance, including participation in the informal economy. Additionally, she examines the under-researched historical connections between the carceral state and psychiatry showing how the era of mass public-order policing underwrote the criminalization and pathologization of racialized, queered, and disabled people that continues to this day.

Daniela is a gender nonconforming Latino scholar with over a decade of community engagement and activism in the trans and queer communities of the Northeastern United States. She serves as the chair of the community advisory board for “Y’all Better Quiet Down”: Trans BIPOC Digitization Initiative” of the Digital Transgender Archive. Previously, she worked with the Rikers Public Memory Project where she co-created the documentary Story by Story: Building A People’s History of Rikers Island.

Her research interests include medical sociology, inequalities, critical criminology, and visual methodology. She earned her B.A. in Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. While at UCLA, Katherine conducted research as a McNair research fellow on gang-affiliated mothers’ resistance through education. She received her master’s degree in Sociology where she examined the ways gang-affiliated women experience institutional violence and developed a conceptual model on life course criminalization. She continues this line of work in her dissertation by examining the experiences of Latina mothers with the carceral system, specifically the Child Welfare system and mental health.

Katherine’s research has been published in multiple journals and book chapters and her work has been included in policymaking toolkits at the United Nations.

Her dissertation examines the history of neonatal intensive care as a proving ground for some of the most significant transformations in the political economy and reproductive politics of the late twentieth-century medical-industrial complex.

Sadie works across the disciplines of history and public health, and has published work on fetal protection laws, the abortion politics of physicians, long-acting injectable HIV treatments, and the experiences of women living with endometriosis. Sadie is a proud organizer and union steward for the Student Workers of Columbia and has worked as a case manager for the New York Abortion Access Fund. She received a B.A. in History from the University of Chicago in 2015. She is also a recipient of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars Women’s Studies Fellowship.

Her dissertation, “Care in Crisis: Black Women and the Politics of Labor in Atlanta, 1965-1985,” examines how working-class Black women organized themselves in domestic worker unions, welfare rights organizations, and as prisoners and mothers to challenge the politics of austerity and to advocate for policies that would value both their waged and unwaged caring labor. Her work has been supported by the National Center for Institutional Diversity and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan.

Eshe is a recipient of the 2021 Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History from Georgia State University. She holds an M.A. in History from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in African American Studies from Yale University.

As the first historical study of queer people in the U.S. foster system, Nora’s dissertation provides a unique lens into the debate over the transformation of the American family. Drawing on original oral history interviews and archival resources, they examine the processes by which shifting notions of race, sexuality, and disability remade American foster care and American family policy more broadly. Nora’s work has been supported by the WW Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the ONE Archives Foundation, and the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Prior to attending graduate school, Nora worked as a community organizer, and a commitment to publicly-engaged scholarship remains central to their work. Nora received an MA in history from University of California, Santa Barbara and a BA in Classics from Macalester College. 

Melanie is currently exploring research as a movement building tool through collaborations with the Momentum Community, the Just Beginnings Collaborative, and the Realizing Democracy Project. Together with movement partners like Sunrise and Color Of Change, Melanie recently authored the Building Structure Shapes report. To continue this work, Melanie joined the SNF Agora Institute’s P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University as a pre-doctoral fellow this academic year (2021-2022).

Melanie is also passionate about pedagogy, having worked for eight years in Berlin as a teacher at a co-operative, democratic high school for non-traditional adult students, which won the Bosch Foundation’s second place prize for best school in Germany in 2016. Melanie received a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a Master’s from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.

Her dissertation, “Liberation for All: Recovering the Lasting Legacy of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), 1968-2012,” offers the first comprehensive study of the group and traces the intellectual genealogies of a “women of color” feminist praxis rooted in the Women’s Liberation Movement(s) of the 1970s and still used today for political activity. Through an organizational approach, Wilson explores the intellectual history of the TWWA. Wilson’s previous activism with Black women survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault continues to shape her interest in social justice through the lens of intersectionality.

Drawing on political speeches, newsletters, articles, pamphlets, and travel logs, “Liberation for all” examines Black women’s contributions to women of color groups in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present. She argues that members’ theorization of the Third World Woman allowed for a successful multiracial feminist coalition that expanded nationally and internationally. By centering working-class women’s issues related to reproductive health, socio-economic disparities, and state violence, the TWWA coalesced Black, Latina, Asian, and Indigenous women under one collective.

At UT, she led the anti-racism committee in her home department, served as the 2019-2020 Graduate Research Assistant for the Institute for Historical Studies, and was a research fellow for the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy between the years of 2017-2020. Her dissertation has been supported by the Sallie Bingham Center; the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics; Smith College Libraries; and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, among others.

Before Yale, she completed a master’s degree in Environmental Justice at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. There she researched how African American college students navigated the outdoor recreational landscape. In 2017, she won the Clyde Woods Prize for best graduate paper in Black Geographies, for her paper “Build A Wall Around Hyde Park: Race, Space and Policing on the Southside of Chicago 1950-2010,” which is currently under review for The Antipode. You can access her article on Police Violence and Environmental Justice here.

She is the author of the essay “Islands of Freedom: The struggle to desegregate Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain National Park 1936-1941” in the forthcoming edited collection Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, Environmental History.

Responding to the rapid growth of undocumented Korean and other Asian American populations in the US, Korean Resource Center (KRC) and the National Korean American Services and Education Consortium (NAKASEC) have become influential players in the Southern Californian and national immigrant justice movements, respectively. Yet Korean Americans’ complex positioning in U.S. racial imaginaries as both victims of white supremacy, and beneficiaries of anti-Blackness gives rise to discursive, ideological, and material contradictions in KRC and NAKASEC’s work.

The resurgence of more overt forms of white supremacy, urgent calls to center anti-Blackness in racial justice work, and social media’s role in mainstreaming and intensifying debates about effective anti-racist praxis combine to create urgent re-conceptualizations of what constitutes a “progressive” stance, and by who and for whom such stances should be elaborated. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Southern California, New York City, and Washington D.C., “Contentious Solidarities” follows KRC, NAKASEC, and the organizers with whom they ally and diverge to show how progressive Korean Americans navigate and respond to the contradictions that arise from shifting conceptualizations of racialized power and privilege.

A decade of organizing in national and local immigrant justice movements motivated Elizabeth to examine the internal racialized politics of immigrant justice worlds and the ways racialization informs how different organizers conceptualize justice for immigrants. A lifetime of navigating her identity as a mixed-race Korean American informs her exploration of the racialized contours of immigrant justice work.