Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the range of social, political, and cultural forces involved in constructing populations as objects of control. Her dissertation is an analysis of crime prevention policy and programming in the Canadian Province of Manitoba from the perspectives of policy-makers and community-based organizations charged with its implementation, and in the context of the history of political struggle over the management of Indigenous youth. She is particularly interested in how left-wing and liberal social welfare programming and criminal justice reforms can inadvertently contribute to strengthening carceral and colonial infrastructure. Bronwyn has been active in organizing around police brutality and prison abolition in Manitoba. She is currently working at the University of Winnipeg in the Department of Criminal Justice.
Erika L. Iverson is a student of comparative politics, studying institutions of migration management and international humanitarian aid, and is a Ph.D. Candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her studies are informed by more than ten years working with refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. Erika teaches courses in comparative politics, sub-Saharan Africa, international relations, and American government at area colleges including, Hunter College, CUNY and appreciates the wide diversity of knowledge and experience her students bring to the classroom. When not working or studying, Erika enjoys reading fiction and loves to attend talks by her favorites writers like Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Salman Rushdie, and so many more.
Malav Kanuga a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center, pursuing studies of space, culture, and power, as well as uneven development. As an urban researcher and as an activist, his interests include issues of value, commons, people’s movements, and urban development. Malav’s research is broadly centered on contemporary struggles around informality, state space, and planning in Mumbai, a city shaped by its deep histories of popular movement as well as many forms of domination and hierarchy. He has conducted 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai among participants in a network of urban people’s campaigns that collectively seek to challenge and transform municipal and national urban governance programs, housing schemes, and land use policies. This work aims to understand how urban informality in Indian cities both entrenches and relies upon salient social differences in the production of uneven and unequal access to land, opportunities, and services. During this time in Mumbai, Malav also taught urban theory at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies and participated in various popular education initiatives among students and workers.
Wen Liu is a PhD candidate in Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. In her dissertation, she draws from queer theory, transnational feminism, critical race theory and affect to understand the dilemmas and struggles in the queer Asian diaspora in the context of US homonationalism and neoliberalism. As a multidisciplinary scholar, Wen is interested in placing critical theories in dialogues with psychological knowledge to seek new theoretical directions. Currently, she is an adjunct professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a guest faculty in Psychology at Sarah Lawrence College. As an international active scholar in the field of LGBTQ studies, Wen is also the co-director of the Institute for Tongzhi Studies, a community based organization that facilitates the transnational dialogues of scholarship, activism, and arts among Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.
Gittell Collective 