Michael is also an organizer with mutual aid and abolitionist organizations in Los Angeles. He received an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and BA from Vassar College.

Grounded in the Rio Grande Valley and Southeast Texas, Orlando Lara’s dissertation focuses on the growth of identity precarity and insecurity through the interrogation and denial of core state identity documents such as US birth certificates and US passports. While research on liminal non-citizen statuses has flourished in recent years, his ethnographic and archival research opens new ground in the study of the ongoing and intensifying challenges to legal citizenship and other forms of purportedly ‘legal’ status, including birthright citizenship itself.

Working with the artist Delilah Montoya, he co-created “Sed: A Trail of Thirst” and, with the Sin Huellas Artist Collective, the multimedia installation, “Detention Nation.”

Their article, “‘Sex Changed by a Court’s Decree’: The History-and-Tradition of Gender Transitions in the United States,” is forthcoming in Georgetown Law Journal. Outside UC Berkeley, Brianne teaches free online queer history classes open to the community. They also volunteer for the Monroe County History Center’s project on the queer history of Bloomington.

Their work has been supported by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association. They have a JD from Berkeley Law and a BA from Columbia University.

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.

Irene was first trained as a sociologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She received an M.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her previous work has informed policies that address gender and health inequality in Perú and has been published in multiple academic and media outlets.

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.

His dissertation, Debtors’ Rights in the Age of Mass Securitization examines mortgage foreclosure as a nexus linking macro-level financialization to forced residential mobility among homeowners. This work traces how mortgage securitization transformed foreclosure into an actively managed profit center, making borrowers’ rights costs that industry players worked to reduce.  This work has been supported by the NSF Law and Science Dissertation Grant.

Walker received his J.D. in 2022 from University of Wisconsin. He received an M.A. from Columbia University, and a B.A. from New College. He also serves as Director of Policy for ProGov21.org, a free digital library of model laws and policies for progressive local governance.

Caitlin uses qualitative methods to investigate how the criminal legal system exacerbates and legitimizes racial and class inequalities, focusing specifically on how legal professionals and impacted community members experience and resist mass criminalization in their daily lives.

Their dissertation examines the role of public defenders in criminal justice reform and transformation, using a multi-method case study of Gideon’s Promise, an Atlanta-based public defense organization that trains defenders to resist mass incarceration. The results lay critical groundwork for research on public defense and penal change, unmasking both the organizational context and individual struggles of progressive criminal defense in the U.S. South.

Caitlin also works with Minnesota organizations that seek to dismantle mass criminalization and support people with criminal records including All Square, Minnesota Justice Research Center, and Children of Incarcerated Caregivers.

Caitlin has a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Arkansas and an M.A. from the University of Minnesota.

Jennifer’s master’s research focused on how Jim Crow laws—and their formal dissolution in the 1960s—shaped labor solidarities. Witnessing workplace surveillance, racism within and outside of labor organizing, and legal restrictions on worker activism in her own workplace cemented her interest in studying legal constraints to worker organizing on and off the job.

Jennifer received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 2015. As a graduate student, she has enjoyed teaching undergraduate students in the history department and through the Southern Oral History Program. Her pedagogical interests extend beyond the college level, and she has been lucky to also work with North Carolina educators and teachers on K-12 curriculum development for U.S. history.