Annie Powers (she/her) is a PhD candidate at UCLA. Annie is a scholar of homeless people's political struggles in the United States. She is an organizer with the Union de Vecinos and the Downtown Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.

Annie's dissertation focuses on the National Union of the Homeless and the struggle for urban land in the late 20th century United States. She analyzes the political power of homeless people within the US in the context of landless people's movements across the Global South. Her research on the long history of unhoused people's political movements stems directly from her work as an organizer of homeless people today.

Katy Maldonado Dominguez (she/her) is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Her experiences as a Central American immigrant inform the question at the heart of her work: How do people find belonging? She uses displacement as a framework to understand the way various communities respond to and challenge social, political, legal, and economic systems that disenfranchise them and insist on stripping them of community, place, and identity. She is interested in exploring these themes in the lives of Central American students, undocumented queer parents, migrant caravans, and undocumented scholars.

As an interdisciplinary scholar she positions her work at the intersections of Ethnic Studies, Central American Studies, Critical Human Geography, Critical University Studies, and Public Humanities.

She received her Bachelor’s Degrees in Chicana/o Studies and Geography from UCLA. Her dissertation, Displaced Kinship: A Politics of Belonging Among Central American Students, explores how children of Central American immigrants inherit and draw from legacies of displacement to articulate their identities, develop a political consciousness, and navigate higher education. Drawing from 40 interviews with students, she proposes a theoretical framework she names “displaced kinship” to demonstrate how Central American students refuse the disenfranchisement that displacement creates for their families and in this refusal develop a form of belonging.

Ellie Kaplan (she/her) is a PhD student at UC Davis where she studies the intersection of disability and US bureaucratic histories. Her dissertation explores how the National Park Service implemented the civil rights provision, Section 504, of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act from the 1970s to the present. Of particular interest are the ways disabled visitors and employees influenced the process and made the law meaningful to their lives.

As an intern with the National Park Service, Ellie conducted oral histories and wrote several articles for their website. The articles range from highlighting disabled visitors’ feedback forms at Yosemite National Park to comparing three guidebooks written by and for disabled visitors, and more. Additionally, Ellie is interested in the integration of disability stories and themes into K-12 curriculums. She has worked for the Library of Congress and the California History-Social Science Project on this endeavor.

Ellie earned her M.A. in history from Syracuse University and her B.S. from Cornell University.

Meredith Jacobson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Studies Program and Sociology Department at University of Oregon. She is a non-Native researcher and organizer with FireGeneration Collaborative, a youth and Indigenous-led coalition working to reimagine fire policy and culture.

Her dissertation explores historical and present-day relationships to wildfire as a window into land relations. Through analysis of historical documents, her research examines how land, labor, and fire are co-constructed under settler colonialism in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Partnering with FireGeneration Collaborative, her dissertation also engages young people in collaborative listening circles to envision their futures working and living with fire.

Meredith has a B.S. in Forestry from UC Berkeley and an M.S. in Forest Ecosystems and Society from Oregon State University.  Her background working in land management motivates her to pursue community-engaged scholarship that disrupts settler colonial power and promotes environmental justice.

Emily Hoffman (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the state child protection apparatus in the U.S., and in Eastern Oklahoma in particular. She writes about how “child abuse” came to be an object of knowledge and state intervention starting in the 1960s, focusing on the repression of political economy, the displacement of questions of historical repair and justice by the trauma concept, racialized and classed reckonings of kinship, and the figure of the child as a figure of projection and fantasy.

She has been an Affiliate Scholar at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the Curatorial and Editorial Manager of the Social Study of Disappearance Lab at Columbia. She is also a poet. She volunteers with Poetic Justice, where she writes in community with women incarcerated in Oklahoma.

Hazel Velasco Palacios (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Pennsylvania State University. Hazel’s dissertation examines how structural and symbolic violence shape healthcare access for Latina/o immigrant farmworker families in Pennsylvania’s dairy and mushroom industries. Using an ethnographic approach, she analyzes how legal precarity, particularly deportability and liminal legality, and gendered labor expectations affect family wellbeing and access to care. Her research draws from fieldwork conducted in counties with large farmworker populations, including over two years of participant observation in food pantries, mobile clinics, and mutual aid networks.

The study highlights the everyday strategies farmworker families use to navigate healthcare exclusions while critically examining the limits of grassroots resilience in the face of systemic neglect.

Hazel’s work has been published in The Journal of Rural Health, Rural Sociology, and Women’s Studies Quarterly and The Conversation. She serves on the advisory council of Mighty Writers El Futuro Kennett and collaborates with immigrant-serving nonprofits.

Her research has been supported by the ASA DDRIG and the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety