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.

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.

Her dissertation examines how Black and Afro-descendent domestic workers have been central to the most progressive elements of the labor movement in the U.S. and how the gendered antiblack violence of slavery’s afterlife shapes their work experiences and fight for survival. Through semi-structured interviews, Black feminist grounded ethnography, media analysis, and oral histories of Black women domestic workers’ political organizing practices and work experiences in Boston, New York City, and D.C., this research investigates how Black and African descendent domestic workers and domestic workers organizations infuse radical care work into community building efforts to mobilize support at the grassroots and federal levels for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and other struggles for workers’ protections and dignity. This research seeks to understand how Black women’s intersectional organizing around care work strengthens Black radicalism within the mainstream labor movement and re-envisions critical paths toward Black emancipation.

In connection with this research, she is currently an intern with the Massachusetts Coalition of Domestic Workers and a volunteer with Matahari Women Workers’ Center, and was a research analyst at Social Action for Health in East London.

Venus holds an M.A. in Medicine, Health, and Society from Vanderbilt University and a B.A. in political science, African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from the  University of California, Irvine. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, the Labor Action and Research Network, the Nichols Humanitarian Fund, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst, the Graduate School at UMass Amherst, the Center for Global Work and Employment at Rutgers, and the Center for Employment Equity at UMass Amherst, to name a few. Her work has been published in Sociology Spectrum.

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.

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.

Her dissertation is a historical analysis of child care as a labor issue. The United States experienced a dramatic growth in maternal labor force participation in the second half of the twentieth century but remains one of the only industrialized nations without a comprehensive approach to child care.

Justine’s dissertation examines how various groups of Americans built and shaped a waged child care workforce to replace the unwaged labor of mothers caring for children in the home. She examines this history on the levels of both grassroots action and governmental policy, exploring how the approaches of workers, families, municipal governments, federal agencies, and labor unions intersected. Central to her study are the ways that ideologies and practices of race, gender, class, and citizenship shaped the demographics of the childcare workforce, conditions of employment, and the social and monetary value of caring labor.

Justine holds an MA in History from Stanford University and a BA in History from Dartmouth College.

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.