Minali is also part of the editorial team for a forthcoming edited volume entitled The Politics of the Multiracial Right (NYU Press 2026), which examines the growing appeal of right-wing politics among communities of color in the U.S.

Before beginning graduate school, Minali worked as a data scientist for five years. She received her B.S. from Georgetown University in 2016.

Selen’s dissertation examines the conditions of possibility for progressive taxation in superstar cities with housing crises and concentrations of corporate power. Through a comparative analysis of key moments of the push for taxation in Seattle between 2017-2020, Selen traces the political shifts and innovations that allowed the city to leverage its proximity to the knowledge economy to generate public revenue. The findings offer insights into how subnational dynamics and institutional structures shape local responses to federal austerity reforms and tax cuts.

Selen works at the University of Washington’s Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE), doing participatory action research with academic changemakers and equity-focused evaluation. Selen earned an MA in Sociology from the University of Washington, and she holds a BA in Sociology from Bogazici University.

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.

His dissertation is a study of how deindustrialization and neoliberalism transform the traditional mechanisms of organizing race and class politics among working-class Mexican-Americans in Chicago’s former steel-producing neighborhoods. Drawing on extensive ethnography and archival materials, he shows how the changing political economy of the urban periphery, the decline of neighborhood civil society, and political competition between teachers and police shape working-class racial politics and collective action.

Prior to pursuing academic research, Rishi worked in community and labor organizing for more than 12 years. Rishi’s project is also supported by a Russell Sage Foundation Dissertation Research Grant and a Graduate Research Fellowship from the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

The legacies of the Allotment Era have produced a highly-fragmented pattern of jurisdiction over both surface land and subsurface minerals in this checkerboard landscape, where alternating tracts of land are complexly administered by federal, tribal, state, and private entities. Jurisdiction not only has profound implications for where, how, and if extraction takes place: it also affects who gets to have a say in the process.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic and archival research in northwestern New Mexico and in Eastern Navajo Agency, Silas’s research analyzes how different jurisdictions parse out components of the region’s ecology for management purposes. Silas attends to both the extra-local and large-scale cumulative effects of extraction that are not contained by the jurisdictions that exist to manage them. Silas’s dissertation traces how relations of sovereignty, territory, and ordinary life are shaped in part through frictions engendered in contests to control energy extraction. Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Silas earned a BA in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University and an MA in Geography from the University of Toronto. Silas came their dissertation research through involvement in the climate justice movement.

Ayca focuses on the relationship between central banks in emerging economies and the financial community to reveal how financial power operates. 

Through a study of central banks in Turkey and South Africa, she illuminates both the degrees of maneuver and the constraints on economic policy in these emerging economies that contend with the danger of sudden outflows of capital.