Selen Guler’s (she/her) work is grounded in comparative historical approaches and problem-solving sociology. Her research focuses on political economy, policymaking processes, and change-making in higher education.

Selen’s dissertation examines the conditions of possibility for progressive taxation in superstar cities with housing crises and concentrations of corporate power. Through a comparative analysis of key moments of the push for taxation in Seattle between 2017-2020, Selen traces the political shifts and innovations that allowed the city to leverage its proximity to the knowledge economy to generate public revenue. The findings offer insights into how subnational dynamics and institutional structures shape local responses to federal austerity reforms and tax cuts.

Selen works at the University of Washington’s Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE), doing participatory action research with academic changemakers and equity-focused evaluation. Selen earned an MA in Sociology from the University of Washington, and she holds a BA in Sociology from Bogazici University.

Irene is a medical sociologist who studies the ties between medicine and poverty governance. Her dissertation uses participant observation, in-depth interviews, and documentary analysis to examine the expansion of healthcare for the unhoused in California and its implications for health inequalities and homelessness governance. Irene’s research documents how medical providers working on the streets of Los Angeles navigate three tensions, (1) who among the large and widespread homeless population becomes their patients and who are left behind, (2) what services they provide considering the multiple social and medical needs of the unhoused and the bureaucratic, technological, and organizational challenges of practicing medicine on the streets, and (3) how they engage the unhoused—a population known for distrusting the medical system—in medical care. This research has been supported by the American Sociological Association and The Haynes Foundation.

Irene was first trained as a sociologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She received an M.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her previous work has informed policies that address gender and health inequality in Perú and has been published in multiple academic and media outlets.

Marc Dadigan is a freelance investigative journalist  and PhD candidate in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. He has worked with Tribes and Indigenous communities in Northern California for more than 14 years as a journalist, public history project organizer, curriculum editor and community-based researcher.

He is working on a dissertation in collaboration with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, the Indigenous people of the McCloud River (Winnemem Waywaket). Titled Listening to Lendada Nur (Ancient, Wise Salmon), the dissertation is an ethnographic and historical investigation into the Winnemem Wintu’s partnership with wildlife agencies to restore salmon to their ancestral watershed for the first time since the Shasta Dam blocked the cultural and ecological keystone species from returning home 80 years ago.

Tribal members are assisting in the scholarship by identifying research objectives, interpreting archival and ethnographic data and developing the theoretical framework based on concepts from the Winnemem Wintu language.

Andrés Besserer Rayas’s dissertation analyzes how and when states provide documentation to undocumented immigrants, and how such documentation, or lack of it, affects them and their families. Using multi-sited ethnographic and comparative analysis, he studies Colombia as a paradigm of inclusionary policies towards immigrants, in contrast to the United States.

His publicly engaged scholarship in the US includes research to protect DACA, advance immigrant rights and health post-Covid-19, driver’s licenses for the undocumented, among other topics. In Colombia, his research on the effects of statelessness was used in a ruling by the country’s highest court that protected plaintiff’s rights, and publicized the issue. He received ESS’s 2023 pre-tenure publicly engaged sociology award.

His research has been published in Sociological Forum; The Journal on Migration and Human Security; Territory, Politics, Governance; among others. He has an MSc from University College London and a BA from El Colegio de México.

Fred has been a politically engaged sociologist for more than forty years. His books include: The Origins of International Economic Disorder, Postindustrial Possibilities, and with Margaret Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism. He is a research professor of sociology at U.C. Davis. To learn more about Fred, click here.

Joseph van der Naald’s dissertation examines the conditions that fostered the rapid growth of public-sector employees’ unions in the United States beginning in the 1960s.

Using a historical comparative analysis of government workers’ movements in Michigan and Ohio, two Midwestern states that once maintained divergent collective bargaining laws for public employees, Joseph’s research traces how insurgent unions in both cases drew upon a diverse set of resources and adapted their forms of mobilization to successfully organize across disparate institutional contexts.

Joseph has published research in Social Service Review, Social Science Research, and the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, and he has taught at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. His dissertation research has received support from the Labor Research and Action Network and the Walter P. Reuther Library. Joseph received his B.A. at Portland State University and an M.A. from the Central European University.