Maya Manian (she/her) is a professor of law and Faculty Director of the Health Law and Policy Program at American University Washington College of Law and a PhD candidate in medical sociology at UCSF. Her research examines the intersection of law and reproductive health care, focusing on how legal regulation shapes clinical practice and patient experiences.

Her dissertation, Legal Consciousness and the Side Effects of Abortion Bans: Genetic Counselors’ Perspectives on Navigating Abortion Law in the Post-Dobbs Era, investigates how abortion restrictions reshape prenatal care through the everyday work of genetic counselors. Drawing on in-depth interviews, she explores how counselors interpret abortion law and how these interpretations shape clinical decision-making, professional relationships, and patient care. By centering providers’ interpretive work, the study shows how law is enacted in practice and its implications for equity,  access, and health care workforce sustainability.

Her research has been supported by the Society of Family Planning, the UCSF Newcomer Health Policy Scholarship, and the UCSF Strauss Dissertation Scholarship. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

Jaqueline Lepe (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation examines California’s shift to community-based youth justice under Senate Bill 823, focusing on how frontline juvenile justice bureaucrats shape the policy’s implementation, to illuminate patterns of resistance and co-optation within the penal system. Drawing on enactive ethnography, interviews, and archival research, she shows how efforts at systemic reform through decarceration are often undermined by frontline bureaucrats committed to punitive logics.

As a first-generation Latina sociologist with prior juvenile justice involvement, Jaqueline is dedicated to mentoring system-impacted youth. During her fieldwork, she served as a college instructor, tutor, and mentor to incarcerated youth in a Southern California juvenile detention facility.

Jaqueline’s research has received support from the National Science Foundation, along with UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Fellowship and the UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship. She holds an M.A. from UC Berkeley and a B.A. from UC Santa Barbara.

Raquel Douglas (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Brown University. Her research focuses on environmental sociology, cultural studies, and Africana studies.

Drawing on multiple methods, her dissertation explores how Black farmers understand the cultural, political, and spiritual significance of farming. “Black Soil and Soul” uplifts the worldviews, values, and practices that inform how North Carolinian Black farmers combat food apartheid and the ongoing decline of Black farmland. Specifically, she calls attention to the ways that religion, spirituality, and the need for healing continue to shape the way that Black farmers relate to their land and their communities. This research has been supported by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Wilson Library, Swearer Center for Public Service, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

Raquel is passionate about reconnecting communities who have been intentionally separated from the land with an intimate connection to the Earth. A budding farmer in her own right, Raquel has spent the last three years collectively growing culturally relevant veggies and medicinal herbs on Black owned-farms in Rhode Island and North Carolina. In these roles, she grew food for communities living under food apartheid and connected dozens of BIPOC folks with limited exposure to farming to the land through workshops, events, and relationship-building. She recently relocated to Durham to manage a new community garden, collaboratively build a community land trust, and teach land-based skills.

She holds a BA in Economics and Africana Studies from Williams College and MA in Sociology from Brown University.

Anna DalCortivo (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research reconceptualizes public safety by exploring how law, social movements, and community governance shape one another through everyday practices and collective action. Challenging approaches that treat socio-legal and social movement research as separate domains, Anna shows how communities build safety, accountability, and political life outside of formal legal systems, highlighting how these efforts reshape public safety on their own terms.

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. 

Catherine Crooke (she/they) is a lawyer and PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Her dissertation draws on over four years of participant observation and nearly 100 interviews with Los Angeles-based legal service providers to examine the U.S. immigration system as a site of both legal promise and institutional erosion. Foregrounding the everyday experiences of immigration lawyers, she shows how institutional instability reshapes professional practice and transforms the meaning of legality itself. More broadly, her project offers a framework for understanding how professionals sustain moral commitments within institutions marked by constraint.

Catherine’s scholarship appears in Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Qualitative Research, and has previously been supported by the Ford Foundation and the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program. She holds a JD from Yale Law School, an MSc from the University of Oxford, and a BA from Columbia University.

Mridula has retired after nearly ten years of work at CES. She is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology, California State University, Sacramento.