Keisha N. Blain is a distinguished historian, writer, and public intellectual whose work centers on United States history, African American history, the modern African diaspora, and women’s and gender studies. She is a professor of history and Africana Studies at Brown University. To learn more about Dr. Blain, click here.

Amy has over 15 years of experience supporting nonprofits in program management and administration. Most recently she was with Harvard Business School Community Partners of Northern California, where she managed their executive education scholarships. Prior to this she supervised a stipend program at the Education Fund, a nonprofit designed to support health care workers who were seeking higher education. Amy earned her B.A. in Psychology at the University of Michigan and her M.S. in Counseling at San Francisco State University.

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.