E. Taylor Silverman (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Taylor's research is at the intersection of trans studies, childhood studies, and medical anthropology. Their dissertation examines the everyday practices and politics of pediatric gender-affirming care in the contemporary United States. Based on long-term clinic- and community-based ethnographic fieldwork, their work centers the experiences and perspectives of youth, families, and clinicians negotiating these politicized issues in their daily lives.

Taylor’s research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Before graduate school, they received a BA from Brown University and worked in public health.

Summer Sullivan (she/her) is a PhD candidate in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. Summer’s research takes advantage of the evolving context in which technologies are transforming social and environmental relations, especially for already exploited, racialized workers. Her dissertation traces the uneven ways in which agricultural automation is unfolding, but also its profound limits within the delicate, leafy farming systems of California’s Salinas Valley. Through interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, her research shows how the materiality of crops like lettuce continues to organize labor and limit technology. Contributing to analyses of the uneven racial and class dynamics of the “future of work,” the project centers the emergent, uncertain relationships among farmworkers, the plants they care for, and the fragile futures of capitalism.

Summer also holds an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Lehigh University. She organizes with UAW 4811.

Guillermo Paez Gallardo (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Irvine. His dissertation, Demolition Men: Precarity, Illegality, and Masculinity at a Latino Workplace, explores how undocumented migrant men navigate an informal and high-risk occupation. Using ethnographic and qualitative methods, Guillermo researches migrant work life at the intersection of race, illegality, and gender. He draws on three years of fieldwork laboring alongside migrant men to understand their struggles with workplace injuries and deaths, exploitation, and the threat of deportation.

Guillermo has a MA and BA in Sociology from UC Irvine. At UC Irvine he’s been part of campaigns and mentorship programs to support undocumented and marginalized students.

Victor Ultra Omni (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their dissertation, The Love Ball: A History of New York City’s House-Structured Ballroom Culture, 1972–1992, offers a historical account of ballroom’s origins through oral histories, participatory action research, and memory work. Their work intervenes in dominant histories of ballroom culture by foregrounding Black forms of intertwined kinship as history-making: a relational praxis that shapes collective survival, rearranges Black femininities, and preserved intergenerational memory amid the grief of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Victor’s body of scholarship grounds approaches to theories of Black gender and sexuality. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Black Scholar, African American Intellectual Historical Society, and Australian Feminist Studies. Previous and current academic appointments include the inaugural Trans Studies at the Commons Fellow at the University of Kansas,  Scholar in Residence at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute and the Ethics and Outreach Coordinator at the University of Victoria’s Transgender Archives. They also co-direct the 2025–2026 Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellowship with Imagining America. Victor’s work is supported by the Mellon Foundation, Society for History of Visual Anthropology, the Ten:Tacles Initiative for Transgender History.

Since 2017, Victor has been a proud member of the Worldwide Pioneering House of Ultra Omni. Currently, they are the co-editing Trans Studies Quarterly issue 13.3 with Dr. Eva Pensis and ballroom-archivist-filmmaker Noelle Deleon and a scholarly advisor to the City Museum of New York City's exhibition ¡Urban Stomp!

Michael Nishimura (he/him) is a PhD candidate in sociology at UCSB. Michael researches the relationship between Asian racialization, the carceral state, and the migrant punishment system. His dissertation focuses on the pathways and livelihoods of formerly incarcerated and deportable Asian Americans to explore the connections between Asian racialization, carcerality, and ongoing imperial relations. Critiquing normative understandings of "reentry," it analyzes how social control and economic precarity affect Asian Americans and provides novel theorizations of criminalization and racialization processes. The research also centers anti-carceral and anti-deportation organizing led by systems-impacted people to explore the complexities of solidarity and community building towards collective liberation.

Michael is also an organizer with mutual aid and abolitionist organizations in Los Angeles. He received an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and BA from Vassar College.

Rosa is the 2025-2026 Democratic Resilience Fellow funded by the Freedom Together Foundation.

Rosa Navarro (she/her) is a first-generation college student and the proud daughter and granddaughter of Mexican Immigrant farmworkers from the Pacific Northwest. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz with a designated emphasis in Latin American and Latinx Studies.

Rosa’s dissertation project is a transnational community-engaged research project in collaboration with Familias Unidas Por La Justicia (FUJ), an independent Indigenous Farmworker Union in Washington. Her project tracks the rise of the H-2A guest worker Program in the state and its long-term implications for local farmworker communities as the temporary guest worker program displaces and replaces local farmworkers from the agricultural labor market. She is also shadowing a transnational labor recruiter who recruits mostly rural Mexican men to work as temporary guest workers in the US to understand the role of labor recruiters in the fast expansion of the H-2A guest worker program.

Rosa was a community organizer for over a decade before returning to academia. She worked mostly in Immigrant rights work, deportation defense campaigns, and organized alongside domestic workers in Chicago for several years. She has an MA in Sociology from the University of Albany, SUNY, an MA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz, and an MA in International Human Rights Law from the American University in Cairo. She holds a BA in History from Portland State University. Her public work has been published in Open Democracy.