Şeyma Özdemir (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines how U.S. child labor law produces “tiered childhoods,” where farmworker children—especially Mexican American, Indigenous, and migrant youth—are pushed to balance schooling and labor under conditions of economic precarity and immigration enforcement. Through interviews, ethnography, and archival research, she analyzes how families and institutions navigate tensions between work, education, and survival, highlighting how policy shapes inequality and access to schooling.

Şeyma organizes with farmworker movements and food mutual aid groups. She holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, and an MA in Sociology from Binghamton University.

Chloé Sudduth (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University whose work sits at the intersection of digital technologies, law, and punishment. She studies the ways that Big Data, algorithmic systems, and criminal legal logics operate to expand punishment and shape power in contemporary society. Her dissertation explores algorithmic tenant screening systems in the private rental housing market as both technical infrastructures and cultural artifacts. These tools become a site where symbolic power is produced, contested, and legitimated. This work explores how notions of risk and broader histories of quantification are leveraged in the housing domain through algorithmic tools.

Sudduth has a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology and Public Policy from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an M.A. in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University. Sudduth’s research interests are deeply tied to her prior work as an advocate and organizer. She also loves making art and fly fishing.

Michelle (she/her) is a certified full spectrum doula and community organizer. Her dissertation offers an ethnographic account of how Black midwives, doulas, and birthing people in the Bay Area mobilize embodied, de-medicalized approaches to care that she conceptualizes as “centering.” It examines how these practices respond to the limitations of state-provided reproductive health systems, particularly for Black birthing people.

Through fieldwork with Black birthworkers and families, the project traces centering as both a practical and political mode of care grounded in embodied knowledge, ancestral traditions, and community-based support systems. These practices foster more autonomous, affirming, and life-sustaining birth experiences while challenging biomedical authority and state regulation of reproduction.

Ultimately, the dissertation argues that Black birthworkers are not only offering alternative models of care, but are also actively reimagining reproductive politics through frameworks of community care, collective liberation, and reproductive justice rooted in Black feminist praxis.

Natalia M. Toscano (she/ella) is a Chicana/o/x studies scholar researching the intersections of social movements, transnationalism, and political imagination. Her dissertation traces the history of exchange between Chicana/o/x communities and the Ejerecito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN or Zapatista)—an Indigenous rebel organization from the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. By analyzing community archives and oral histories of Chicana/o/x organizers, writers, and artists, Natalia’s dissertation examines the strategies of accompaniment used by Chicanx and Zapatista communities to critique the global neoliberal turn and build pluriversal and dignified lives. Broadly, her research theorizes Chicanx political imaginations rooted in anti-capitalist and decolonial horizons.

In the spirit of creating community spaces of self-determination, Natalia is a member of the Chicanx World Making and Futurities project, a do-it-yourself rasquache multi-media and popular education collective. Additionally, she serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal.

Aarushi Shah (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Sociomedical Sciences and Anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation is an ethnography of the U.S. criminal legal response to intimate partner violence. Set in a domestic violence court, it follows the broader network of legal and therapeutic actors who adjudicate these cases, including court-mandated rehabilitative programs for people accused or convicted of abuse. The project examines how contested understandings of violence are translated into routine case dispositions, rehabilitative mandates, and therapeutic interventions within the criminal legal system.

Drawing on courtroom observation, archival analysis, and in-depth interviews with legal actors, defendants, program staff, and advocates, the dissertation traces how alternatives to incarceration, intervention mandates, and discretionary plea negotiations shape the everyday meaning of accountability in these cases. Situating domestic violence courts alongside the parallel architecture of drug and mental health courts, Aarushi examines the uneven fit between intimate partner violence and the rehabilitative and problem-solving frameworks increasingly adopted across the criminal legal system. Her work engages scholarship on street-level bureaucracy, legal social construction, therapeutic jurisprudence, and feminist theories of visibility, interpretation, and evidence.

Aarushi is particularly interested in ethnography as a method for examining how institutional practices reproduce social inequalities through ordinary bureaucratic routines and discretionary decision-making. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF GRFP), the National Institutes of Health (T32 in Gender, Sexuality and Health), and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Before beginning her doctoral work, she received her BA in Social Anthropology and Global Health from Harvard College.