Who We Are

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.

Mridula has spent over 30 years advocating for gender and economic equity. More recently, she developed and managed education equity programs for first-generation college students. She is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology, California State University, Sacramento.

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.

Steve Dubb has been written about and participated in cooperative education and development for the past three decades. Steve is currently senior editor at Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ), where he directs NPQ’s economic justice program. Steve is the lead author of Building Wealth: The Asset-Based Approach to Solving Social and Economic Problems (Aspen 2005), coauthor (with Rita Hodges) of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads (MSU Press, 2012, and editor of Conversations on Community Wealth Building (Democracy Collaborative 2016).

Deborah Gould is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press 2009), eplores the affective stimuli and blockages to political activism while documenting a disappearing queer history, all with an eye toward opening imaginative possibilities for the present. Involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years, and later in Queer to the Left, she also was a founding member of the research/art/activist collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed. For more information, click here.

Carole has worked for decades to help protect women’s reproductive health from continuing right-wing attacks. Her influential books include Doctors of Conscience and Dispatches from the Abortion Wars. She is currently affiliated with the Bixby Center in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences, UCSF.

Karl is the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Law at Northeastern University. His research has centered on labor law and constitutional law with a special focus on South Africa. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pretoria in recognition of his scholarship on transformative constitutionalism, which, according to the University’s citation, “has precipitated in South Africa no less than a paradigm shift in post-apartheid legal thinking.”

Aldon Morris is the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He is a past President of the American Sociological Association. His books include The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. DuBois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. In that latter book, Morris challenges the conventional account that credits Robert Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago for developing modern sociology. He argues instead that the pioneering work had been done years earlier at Atlanta University by DuBois and his collaborators.

Margaret is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her books include Genealogies of Citizenship and The Power of Market Fundamentalism (with Fred Block). Her work has been broadly influential in cultural sociology, economic sociology, citizenship studies, and social movement research.

Pat Zavella is Professor Emerita of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism. She serves on several nonprofit boards including California Latinas for Reproductive Justice and Community Agroecology Network. For more information, click here.