Simon Addison
Simon Addison is a Visiting Scholar at the center and Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. A geographer and humanitarian practitioner with ten years experience in the fields of humanitarian relief and protection, Simon’s research seeks to develop a critical understanding of conflict-related humanitarian crises through the use of theoretical tools derived from critical theory, historical geographical materialism, post-colonialism and political ecology. He completed his doctoral work in Geography at the University of Oxford, where until recently he worked as the Senior Research Officer and Policy Programme Manager for the Refugee Studies Centre. Simon’s current project, entitled ‘the space of crisis’ seeks to develop a theoretical framework for better understanding the spatiality of complex humanitarian emergencies through a comparative analysis of situations in Uganda, Congo, Darfur and Sri Lanka.

Email: saddison1@gc.cuny.edu

 

Chris Caruso is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he studies poverty, social movements, and new media. The focus of his dissertation is how grassroots anti-poverty organizations and social movements are using information technology to develop innovative strategies and new models of organizing. Chris is an Instructional Technology Fellow at the Macaulay Honors College and City College. He has also taught Urban Studies at Queens College. Chris received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania. He has spent more than 20 years working with organizations of the poor and working class in the US and globally.

Selected Publications

“New Forms of Organizing: The Struggle for Water in Post-Industrial Detroit.” in Baptist and Rehmann (eds.), Pedagogy of the Poor. New York: Teachers College Press (forthcoming).

Email: ccaruso@gc.cuny.edu

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid where she is also a lecturer. Her research has focused on the problematic intersection between development policies and tourism in Mexico and Spain, and, more specifically, in the use of alternative tourisms as development tools. As a member of the international research Tourism, Territory and New Mobilities (Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain) she is currently investigating tourism (im)mobilities, conservation and development policies in the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico). She is also part of the research team Understanding the Dynamics of Urban Flexibility and Reconstruction (Oxford University) intended to develop an analytical framework to question, understand and evaluate notions of urban flexibility in the context of reconstruction following catastrophic disruptions.

Selected Publications
Córdoba Azcárate, M., Córdoba Ordóñez, J. 2007 “Tourism and regional development. Three models of tourist implementation in the state of Quintana Roo (Yucatán, México)”, in Muscar Benasayag & Bruno Schmitt (eds.) Local development and environment in Latin America. Tools and actions. Madrid: Universidad Complutense (in Spanish).

Córdoba Azcárate, M., Urry, J. 2007 “Mobility”; “Nomadism and Tourism”; “Travel and systems of mobility” in Barañano, A. (coord.) Dictionary of intercultural relations. Diversity and globalization. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, pp. 244-250, 275-279, 355-358 (in Spanish).

Email: matile4@yahoo.es

Kathleen Dunn is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a Writing Fellow at Brooklyn College. Her dissertation explores the role of labor in the politics of public space through an analysis of street vendor organizing in New York City. Her research focuses on issues of urban theory, globalization and stratification, and gender and sexuality. She is a co-founder ofFormations: The Graduate Center Journal of Social Research.

Selected Publications
“Flexible Families: Latino Food Vending in Brooklyn, New York.” In Kristina Graaf and Noa Ha (eds.) Urban Street Vending: Politics, Practices and Representations of a Marginalized Economy. Forthcoming 2011. New York: Berghahn Books.

“Biological Determinism and LGBT Tolerance: A Quantitative Exploration of Biopolitical Beliefs.” Western Journal of Black Sociology, 2010, Vol. 34, No. 3, 365-377.

Email: kdunn@gc.cuny.edu

Frances Fox Piven is a member of the political science and sociology faculties at the Graduate Center. She is the author or co-author of such books as REGULATING THE POOR, POOR PEOPLE’S MOVEMENTS, THE NEW CLASS WAR, WHY AMERICANS DON’T VOTE, THE WAR AT HOME, CHALLENGING AUTHORITY and, most recently, KEEPING DOWN THE BLACK VOTE. She is currently at work on a book on American labor union strategies in response to globalization and the new economy.

Email: FFox-Piven@gc.cuny.edu

Valerie Fransicso is a doctoral candidate in sociology at CUNY, The Graduate Center. Her dissertation, a participatory project with Filipino migrant women working as domestic workers in New York City and their families in the Philippines, explores the dynamics of transnationalism and diaspora for Filipino migrants, their families and its possibilities for political mobilization. In her work, gender and labor and globalization are key to examining the lives of migrant women.

Valerie’s work in the Filipino community in New York City influences all things academic in her life. She is a founding member of Filipinas for Rights and Empowerment (FiRE) (www.firenyc.org), a Filipino women’s grassroots organization that works around issues of Filipino immigrant and Filipino American women, like immigration reform, violence against women and children and LGBTQI issues.

Email: valeriefrancisco@gmail.com

Setha Low is the co-author, with Neil Smith, of The Politics of Public Space (Routledge, 2005). She plans to address the following research questions as a fellow this year. Based on current observations of public space during this economic crisis and previous research on the privatization of public space and the changes in the Latin American plaza: 1) What accounts for the shift in both who (right or left wing organizations and workers) uses public space to protest and the more limited nature and extent of current expressions of political struggle and discontent? 2) Do observations about the different kinds of protest and the state’s response in Latin America provide insights into the lack of public space protest in New York City? 3) How are public spaces as places of work utilized during an economic crisis with massive unemployment? 4) Are informal sectors workers, such as vendors and artists, increasingly occupying public spaces to organize and defend their right to work?

Email: slow@gc.cuny.edu

Jamie McCallum is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation covers transnational labor struggles in North America, South Africa, and India, a longstanding interest stemming from his former work within trade unions. He works occasionally with the International Labour Organization and is currently a researcher within the Global Labour University. As a member of the board of directors of the Left Forum, he hopes radical thinking will someday mean radical social change.

Email: jmccallum@gc.cuny.edu

Mary McGlynn is an Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and the author of Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). She has published and spoken on James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, and other contemporary Scottish and Irish writers, as well as on film, country music, cultural studies, and Irish America. Her research focuses on literary experimentation and nonstandard Englishes; the intersection of formal and stylistic techniques with regional, class, and gender politics; and the literary and geographic dynamics of space.

Email: mary.mcglynn@baruch.cuny.edu

Premilla Nadasen is associate professor of history at Queens College (CUNY). Her first book, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005), outlines the ways in which African American women on welfare forged a feminism of their own out of the political and cultural circumstances of the late 1960s and 1970s. It won the John Hope Franklin Prize awarded by the American Studies Association. A longtime community activist and scholar, she has worked with numerous social justice organizations, including Domestic Workers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She has written for Feminist Studies, the Women’s Review of Books, Race and Reason, Ms. Magazine, and the Progressive Media Project.  In addition, she has given numerous public talks about African-American women’s history, welfare policy, and labor organizing.  Her current book on the history of domestic worker organizing in the United States examines how domestic workers have reshaped the landscape of labor organizing over the past forty years.

Email: premilla.nadasen@qc.cuny.edu

Immanuel Ness

Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy, and migrant worker resistance to oppression. Ness just completed Guest Workers, Corporate Despotism and Resistance to Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois Press 2011) and is coeditor of Ours to Master and to Own: Worker Control from The Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011). His book, Immigrants, Unions, and the U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press) examines struggles among autonomous worker organizations in New York. He is editor of the peer-review quarterly journal, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society and General Editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (forthcoming, Wiley Blackwell 2013). He edited the eight-volume International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present (Blackwell, 2009). Currently he is writing a book on new forms of worker organizing.

Email: Iness@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Andrew Newman is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include urban space, social movements, immigration, national identity, nature, and the environment. His dissertation, Landscaping Discontent: Space, Class, and Social Movements in Immigrant Paris, is a study of a grassroots mobilization to build a park in one of Paris’ immigrant neighborhoods; he expects to defend it in spring of 2011. Along with Michèlé Jolé and Stéphane Tonnelat, he is co-author of Le Public des Jardins de Paris Entre Observation et Action (forthcoming) which examines the politics of parks and green space in the global city. His project at the Center is concerned with the spatial politics of the Sans-Papiers movement in Paris.

Email: anewman@gc.cuny.edu

Diana Polson is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. For over six years, Diana has served as Project Coordinator, Policy Analyst and Research Associate for several funded research studies on a range of issues, including workplace violations in low-wage industries, ageing services in New York state, human rights and discrimination in N.Y.C., cross-national working time and family leave policies, and conservative and liberal think tanks. Between 2007 and 2010, Diana coordinated the New York City component of the 2008 Unregulated Work Survey, a survey of over 4,300 low-wage workers in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles through her work with the National Employment Law Project and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Her dissertation examines how public policies and funding shape the working conditions of home-based care workers in the three largest U.S. cities. Previously, Diana worked as an economic justice organizer in California.

Email: dianapolson@yahoo.com

Jennifer Ridgley is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. Her current research explores the convergence between the management of migration and the criminal justice system in the United States, focusing on the restructuring of the U.S. Immigration Service during the late 1930s and early 1940s. A geographer and activist engaged with the politics of labor, citizenship, and social movements, her broader research interests include urban policing, law and geography, and border security. Her first book manuscript, Cities of Refuge: Citizenship, Legality, and Exception in U.S. Sanctuary Cities, documents the evolution of city sanctuary policies in the United States, highlighting the significance of the city as a site through which to understand the bordering practices of state institutions.

Selected Publications
(Forthcoming) “Refuge, Refusal, and Acts of Holy Contagion:  The City as Sanctuary for Soldiers Resisting the Vietnam War.” ACME:  An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies.

(2008) “Cities of Refuge: Immigration Enforcement, Police, and the Insurgent Genealogies of Citizenship in U.S. Sanctuary Cities.” Urban Geography 29(1): 53-77.

Email: jridgley@gc.cuny.edu

Justin Rogers-Cooper is a full-time instructor of English composition and literature at LaGuardia Community College and a PhD candidate in English and American studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His dissertation is entitled Revolutionary Emotions: Crowd Fictions and the Crisis of American Nationality, 1860-1935. It traces how American authors such as Martin R. Delany, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt presented the crowd as a critical agent of social change in a restricted democracy, particularly in situations of political and economic crisis. While the historical lens for the dissertation is transatlantic nineteenth and early twentieth century social psychology, the theoretical framework involves reconciling the politically excited crowd with contemporary scholarship on the affective turn, specifically within the philosophical trajectory of Baruch de Spinoza. His larger research interests involve the realist and naturalist novel, the cultural psychology of mass movements, the history and politics of fossil fuels, and ecological catastrophe. He has also taught at Kingsborough Community College, Queens College, and Skidmore College.

Email: justinrogerscooper@gmail.com

Daniel Sanfelici is a Visiting Scholar at the center and a doctoral student at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil. His current research deals with the recent changes occurring on the waterfront of Porto Alegre (Southern Brazil) as a result of large-scale property development and state policies designed to prepare the city for the next FIFA World Cup in 2014. He also considers the close connections being established in Brazil between the financial sector and housing markets as a fundamental background for understanding the rapid changes taking place in metropolitan areas. At the University of Sao Paulo, Daniel has participated in seminars and discussions about Marx’s and Henri Lefebvre’s works and their potential for interpreting present-day urban development. His main interests include the connections between crisis and urbanization; regional differentiations in the urbanization process; the effects of neoliberal urban policies; and the intensification of socio-spatial fragmentation in metropolitan areas.

Email: danielsanfelici@gmail.com

Stevphen Shukaitis is assistant professor at the University of Essex and an editor with Autonomedia. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009, Autonomedia) and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.

 

George Vachadze is an assistant professor of Economics at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 2003 and Ph.D. in Economics from the Center of Economic Research and Graduate Education of Charles University in 1999. Before joining The City University of New York, he worked as a researcher at the Department of Economics at Bielefeld University in Germany and as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at Hunter College of The City University of New York. His current research interests are in the areas of international economics, monetary theory, and economic growth.

Selected Publications
“Endogenous Inequality of Nations through Financial Asset Market Integration” (coauthored with V. Böhm), Macroeconomic Dynamics, vol. 14 (2010), pp 285-310

“Capital Accumulation with Tangible Assets” (co-authored with V. Böhm), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 68 (2008), pp. 248-57

Email: george.vachadze@csi.cuny.edu

Claudia Villareal Zamorano is a Mexican social anthropologist who specializes in urban studies. She is a visiting researcher at the CPCP. In 1999, she gave her dissertation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, which analyzed housing strategies among low-income families in Ciudad Juárez, a city on the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2000, she joined as researcher the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico City.
Since then she has worked on four major projects: Minimal Housing for Workers in post-revolutionary Mexico; Middle class and urban spaces; Privatization of public security and spaces; Vulnerable populations and spatial justice in metropolitan spaces.

Selected publications
Naviguer dans le désert: itinéraires résidentiels á la frontière Mexique/Etats-Unis, Credal, Paris, 2003. (Spanish translation: 2008 Casa-Chata, Mexico).
Special Journal coordinator
“Clases medias y espacios urbanos”, Alteridades, 34, 2007,UAM, Mexico.