In addition to studying the NUH, she is an active participant in the group’s 21st century revival — as both a historian and an organizer. Told from Los Angeles, where Annie organizes housed and unhoused people together on the neighborhood level, her dissertation aims to arm poor communities in struggle with the weapon of their own history.

Her dissertation, Building the Square: Protest, Governance, and Abolitionist Safety at George Floyd Square, draws on five years of ethnographic research, fifty-nine interviews, archival materials, and visual analysis to explore how a protest site marking a police muder became civic infrastructure for care, accountability, and public safety outside formal institutions. She demonstrates how residents construct norms and sustain care, transforming public safety into a relational, community-driven achievement.

Her award-winning scholarship appears in Mobilization and Contexts, and her public writing in The Nation. At the University of Minnesota, she is an award-winning instructor recognized for her creative and engaged pedagogy. 

Her dissertation studies how community groups participated in and opposed redevelopment in Los Angeles’ Chinatown from 1975-2005. Within systems of urban governance that promote community-engagement and participatory governance, claims of community ownership gives local actors legitimacy to define who governs, how they come to govern, and who speaks for the urban poor. Using archival documents, interviews, and historical quantitative data, her dissertation analyzes how the power to define the neighborhood and its priorities was contested by groups with different social, economic, and cultural ties to the space and how these contestations shaped what groups the government legitimized as community representatives, how projects were prioritized and funded, and who benefited from redevelopment projects.

Outside of UCLA, Victoria volunteers as a tenant organizer. She received a BA in Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.

Brie is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, titled “When the Street Lights Come On: How a ‘Smart City’ became a Surveillance State,” explores how smart street lights became a tool for law enforcement, even when this was not their intended use, and the consequences for historically criminalized communities of color. She also interrogates how cities address residents’ concerns regarding accountability, transparency, and privacy rights when adopting surveillant technologies. Through qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival research, Brie traces the historical uses of street lights for surveillance and social control, culminating in the smart street lights of today.

Brie also has a Masters in Public Policy/Master of Arts in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Brandeis University and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Gender Studies from New College of Florida

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.

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 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.

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.

As an urban environmentalist and political ecologist, Corbin examines the relationships between society and nature within the built environment by investigating the concept of the green city within the context of the United States. Her dissertation focuses on how the relationships between race, class, and access to green space have changed from 1960—prior to the Civil Rights Acts—to 2019, after Oakland, California began establishing its sustainability agenda and during an intensifying gentrification process.

Corbin questions how environmental policies and practices in green cities are impacting the lived experiences of low-income residents and communities of color and their access to public green spaces today and what that could mean for future populations living in green cities.

As the chair of the City of Oakland Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission (PRAC) Corbin serves her community through civic engagement by researching, reporting, and making recommendations to City Council on Park and Recreation policies and as the PRAC liaison to three Recreation Advisory Councils, the local community park stewards.

Corbin is also an executive committee member of the California Outdoor Engagement Coalition focused on getting youth who reflect the overall demographics of California into the outdoors by providing transformational experiences.