Madeline Fox is an Assistant Professor of Children & Youth Studies and Sociology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She received her PhD from the Critical Social-Personality Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Maddy is interested in the overlap between art and participatory knowledge production, research methodologies for provoking political solidarity, and young peoples’ every day experiences of public policy. She was the director of the Polling Justice Project, a participatory action research (PAR) project on youth experiences at the intersections of education, criminal justice and public health in New York City. Her current research is a PAR project on the lived experience of economic inequality from the perspective of young people in School District 15 in Brooklyn. Maddy is affiliated with the Public Science Project, is published in journals such as Journal of Social Issues, Children & Society, and, Social & Personality Psychology Compass, and she co-edited the volume Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims with Rickie Solinger and Kayhan Irani.
Leigh T. Graham, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Psychology as well as in the Department of Public Management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her research focuses on the contentious politics of urban redevelopment, especially after disasters and in periods of crisis, with particular emphasis on the roles of race, class, and geography in shaping competing meanings and strategies of action. Most recently, Leigh has examined the contested meanings of reconstruction in Rockaway, Queens after Superstorm Sandy. Her work on community economic redevelopment in Lower Manhattan after September 11, 2011 is featured in Economic Development Quarterly. Her analysis of the struggle to preserve public housing in post-Katrina New Orleans is published in JAPA and Housing Policy Debate. Leigh has also served as a consultant to foundations and non-profits on affordable housing and neighborhood redevelopment; she was the Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation in Boston, MA, prior to joining CUNY. Leigh has a PhD in Urban Studies & Planning from MIT, and an MBA from NYU.
Lawrence Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. His research interests focus on issues of social inequality. Current research examines the relationship between high profile black elected officials and racial inequality. Contrary to common understandings, Lawrence has found that that black elected officials maintain a regular racial discourse that is mainly symbolic. It is problematic that their political rhetoric often downplays systemic inequality to promote and achievement ideology. Developing research supported by the Marilyn Gittell foundation, brings him back to his hometown of Chicago to explore the role of high school football coaches on the South Side. Many of the young men who work with these coaches not only graduate high school, but go on to live successful lives. This investigation seeks to understand how the coaches supplement valuable social resources that are often lacking in an area where there are concentrated disadvantages rooted in poverty.
Prithi Kanakamedala is an Assistant Professor of History at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. Her research interests include material culture of the Black Atlantic, nineteenth century free black communities in New York and Brooklyn, and the History of New York City. As a public historian she has worked for Place Matters, Brooklyn Historical Society, Weeksville Heritage Center, and Irondale Ensemble Project. Her current exhibit Brooklyn Abolitionists can be seen at the Brooklyn Historical Society and is part of a larger public history project entitled In Pursuit of Freedom examining Brooklyn’s nineteenth century anti-slavery movement. Dr. Kanakamedala holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex and is originally from Liverpool, England.
Yung-Yi Diana Pan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College – City University of New York, and earned her PhD from University of California, Irvine. She has broad research interests in race and ethnicity, processes of racialization, immigrant adaptation, identity formation, professional socialization, and law and society. Her current research challenges traditional theories of immigrant integration by underscoring the significance of race and phenotype in elite professions. She is working on her first book, which examines the professional socialization and continued racialization of Asian American and Latino law students.
Brian Rosa is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College. An urban planner and human geographer by training, his teaching and research focus on cultural political economy, critical urban theory, the contested politics of built heritage, urban infrastructure, and visual urbanism. He has conducted research on urban transformation in Mexico, Great Britain, the United States, and Spain. He is the co-editor (with Christoph Lindner) of the forthcoming volume Deconstructing the High Line: Essays on Postindustrial Urbanism (Rutgers University Press). His Gittell Grant supported his summer research in Spain focusing on political and cultural conflicts surrounding the Great Mosque of Córdoba, an UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Naomi Schiller is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her research and teaching focus on the anthropology of media, the state, and social movements in Latin America. She is currently completing her manuscript, Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela. Dr. Schiller has produced several short documentary films together with Caracas-based community media producers. Her writing appears in American Ethnologist, Dialectical Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, and Mass Communication and Society
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