Sophie Bjork-James has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is finalizing a book manuscript titled The Divine Institution: The Racial Politics of White Evangelicalism’s Theology of the Family, on race and evangelical politics in the United States. Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, and The Ethnic Studies Review. Her work has been featured on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, the New York Times, and BBC Radio 4’s Today.
Carwil Bjork-James is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia (forthcoming from University of Arizona Press). His research—both ethnographic and historical—concerns disruptive protest, grassroots autonomy, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in South America. This work draws on his experience as an environmental and human rights advocate and as a participant in direct action protest movements. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (from the CUNY Graduate Center) and a Masters in Environmental and Human Rights Policy (University of Chicago).
John Clarke is an Emeritus Professor at the UK’s Open University and is also a recurrent Visiting Professor at Central European University. He has been working on the politics and policies of Austerity and the rise of nationalist, populist and authoritarian politics. Recent publications include: Making Policy Move: Towards a politics of translation and assemblage (with Dave Bainton, Noémi Lendvai and Paul Stubbs; Policy Press, 2015) and Critical Dialogues: Thinking Together in Turbulent Times, based on a series of conversations with people who have made him think (Policy Press, 2019).
Gerald Creed is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has conducted research in rural Bulgaria since 1987 on diverse topics including political economy, ritual, nationalism, socialist nostalgia, and gender. His first book, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (1998) examines the impact of collectivization, socialist agrarian reforms and subsequent privatization efforts on village and household economies. His subsequent project, entitled Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria (2011) uses ancient fertility rites still popular in Bulgaria to challenge standard orthodoxies of postsocialist studies.
Lesley Gill teaches anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on political violence, labor, class and state formation in Latin America and the United States. Her most recent book is A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency and Human Rights in Colombia (Duke, 2016), and she is the co-editor of Fifty Years of Peasant Wars in Latin America (Berghahn, in press).
Nazia Kazi is an anthropologist specializing in Islamophobia, racism, and the global war on terror. Her public-facing scholarship has been featured on TedX, Democracy Now!, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her book, Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics, explores the relationship between empire-building and American racism. She lives in Philadelphia and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stockton University, where she is also affiliated with the American Studies and Africana Studies programs.
Lilith Mahmud is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in feminist anthropology and critical European studies with research interests in secrecy, transparency, migration, nationalism, liberalism, and the Right. Her first book, The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters: Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in Italian Masonic Lodges (University of Chicago Press, 2014), was awarded the William A. Douglass Prize for best ethnography in Europeanist anthropology. Prof. Mahmud has served on the Executive Board of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (2017-2019), and as Book Review Editor for American Anthropologist (2010-2013).
Jeff Maskovsky is executive officer (chair) and professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center, and professor of urban studies at Queens College, CUNY. His research and writing focus on poverty, politics, welfare, health, security, and governance in the United States. His publications include The New Poverty Studies: Ethnographies of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States (NYU Press) and Rethinking America: The Imperial Homeland in the 21st Century (Paradigm Press).
Jennifer Riggan is Professor of International Studies in the Department of Historical and Political Studies at Arcadia University. A political anthropologist whose ethnographic research focuses on political identities and state formation, she has published on the changing relationship between citizenship and nationalism, the de-coupling of the nation and the state, and the relationship between militarization, education and development. Her current research explores the effects of new paradigms in global migration management on Ethiopian refugee policy and Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia. She is the author of The Struggling State: Nationalism, Mass Militarization and the Education of Eritrea (2016). She has been awarded the Georg Arnhold Professorship in Education for Sustainable Peace (2019), a Fulbright Scholar Award for Ethiopia (2016-17) a Spencer/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship (2012-14) and a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship.
Don Robotham is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Advanced Research Collaborative. His fieldwork has been in the gold mines of Ghana and in various countries in the English-Speaking Caribbean. He is the author of Militants or Proletarians? the Economic Culture of Underground Goldminers in southern Ghana; and Culture (Cambridge African Studies Center Monographs 1989), Society, Economy: Globalization and its Alternatives (Sage 2007). He has published extensively on anthropological theory, economic anthropology, and political economy as well as on issues of development in the Caribbean and West Africa. His work has appeared in the American Ethnologist, Identities, South Atlantic Quarterly, Social and Economic Studies, Transforming Anthropology and various book collections. His most recent effort is “Interrogating Post-Plantation Caribbean Society” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol 23, No 2 July 2018. He sits on the editorial board of the Critique of Anthropology.
Preeti Sampat teaches Sociology in the School of Liberal Studies in Ambedkar University Delhi. Trained as an anthropologist, she works on urbanization, infrastructure and land rights in India and is currently developing a manuscript that analyzes 'India's land impasse' in the context of India's growing 'rentier economy;' struggles against dispossession; and the current historical conjuncture of the rise of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism). Her research interests include legal anthropology; the anthropology of infrastructure; urbanization; capital; nature; state; social movements; democracy; and authoritarianism.
Noah Theriault is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University, where he offers courses on Southeast Asia, environmental justice, and social theory. His research uses ethnographic methods to trace how global-scale forces of social and environmental change shape the lives of rural and urban communities in the Philippines, with particular attention to the everyday practices through which those forces are enacted, contested, and potentially transformed. This includes a long-term study of indigeneity and biodiversity conservation in Palawan and more recently a political ecology of transportation infrastructure in Manila. Dr. Theriault’s other primary interests include antiauthoritarian theory/practice and decolonial approaches to global ecological crisis.
Mary N. Taylor’s praxis sits at the intersection of Anthropology, dialogical art, and urbanism. Her research focuses on overlapping sites, techniques and politics of civic cultivation, social movement, and cultural management; the ethico-aesthetics of nationalism, cultural differentiation, and people’s movements; and the politics of solidarity. Her publications have appeared in Focaal, Bajo al Volcan, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and the Journal of Hungarian Studies, among others. Her books include Co-Revolutionary Praxis; Accompaniment as a Strategy for Working Together (with Charlotte Huddleston, Abby Cunnane, and Sakiko Sugawa, 2015 ST PAUL St. Gallery Publishing) and Movement of the People: Populism, Folk Dance, and Citizenship in Hungary (Forthcoming 2020, Indiana University Press. She is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast, and is a key organizer of annual LeftEast summer encounters convened in movement spaces in Budapest, Sofia, Istanbul, Kaunas, and Skopje. The work of Brooklyn Laundry Social Club, which she cofounded in 2012, has been exhibited in the Living Gallery and the Office for Urban Disturbances (Mitchell Innes and Nash Gallery). Taylor has taught anthropology at Hunter College and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and urban theory and methods at Parsons, The New School. She is currently Assistant Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.