Ben Agger works in critical theory, cultural/media/internet studies, and critical food and exercise studies at Texas-Arlington, where he also directs the Center for Theory and edits the journal Fast Capitalism. Among his recent books are Body Problems: Running and Living Long in a Fast-Food Society, Oversharing: Presentations of Self in the Internet Age, Texting toward Utopia: Kids, Writing, and Resistance, and (edited with Timothy W. Luke) Gun Violence and Public Life. He is working on Social Problems and Personal Agency in a Global Grid (with Beth Anne Shelton).
Kevin S. Amidon is an Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. A specialist in German language and history, his published scholarship has focused upon the historical co-development of the social and biological sciences. His current research explores the institutionalization of the academic discipline of biology, orchestra and opera as agents of political subjectivity, and risk-pooling as a unifying category of early-modern political economy.
Nicole Marie Brown is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores consumerism as a political project. Specifically, her research explores how African Americans experienced consumerism as a political project during key historical periods and how interconnected identities influenced the ways in which people experienced and made meaning of consumerism.
Harry F. Dahms is Associate Professor of Sociology, Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Social Justice, and Co-Chair of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He previously taught at Florida State University; and also, as a visiting professor, at University of Göttingen, Germany, and University of Innsbruck, Austria. In addition, he is the editor of Current Perspectives in Social Theory and a co-director of the International Social Theory Consortium. He is the author of The Vitality of Critical Theory and has published in Sociological Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Comparative Sociology, and other journals, along with chapters in encyclopedias and handbooks. Currently, he is finishing a book manuscript, Modern Society as Artifice: Critical Theory and the Dynamics of Alienation, Anomie, and the Protestant Ethic (Ashgate).
Tom Johnson, who lives in Vancouver, Canada, has a degree from the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena, CA. He works in a garage studio filled with sketches, sculpted studies and diagrams, creating both commercial and fine art works. He was recently a concept artist with Electronic Arts and is currently a matte painter on feature film projects for Sony Imageworks. His earlier film work includes contributions to The Fifth Element, Animatrix: Flight of the Osiris, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
Moon-Kie Jung teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a co-editor, with João H. Costa Vargas and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, of State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (2011) and the author of Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii’s Interracial Labor Movement (2006) and Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present (2015).
James Kilgore is a Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). During his six and a half years of incarceration in California (2002–9) he completed a number of novels, three of which have been published: We Are All Zimbabweans Now, Freedom Never Rests and Prudence Couldn’t Swim. In addition to researching the criminal justice system, he has also written widely on globalization and the role of the state in southern Africa.
Jae Kyun Kim is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His major research interests are history of race in the East Asia during the Age of Empire, sociology of empire, and social movement.
Daniel Krier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Specializing in political economy, his 2005 book Speculative Capitalism: Stock Market Power and Corporate Change (SUNY Press) and other articles analyze the structure and social consequences of financial speculation. Other work has focused upon critical analyses of financial markets, corporate organization, consumption markets and popular culture. His current work maps the capitalist circuits that structure mass spectator events.
Christian Lotz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. He is the author of numerous works in post-Kantian European philosophy, critical theory, Marxism, and aesthetics. His main research area is post-Kantian European philosophy. His most recent books are The Capitalist Schema. Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction (Lexington Books, 2014), Christian Lotz zu Marx: Das Maschinenfragment (Laika Verlag, 2014), and an edition titled Ding und Verdinglichung. Technik- und Sozialphilosophie nach Heidegger und der kritischen Theorie (Fink Verlag, 2012). His current research interests are in European political philosophy and contemporary Marxism; web address: http://christianlotz.wordpress.com.
Timothy W. Luke is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He also is Program Chair for Government and International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs, and founding director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Social Thought (ASPECT) doctoral program in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. His most recent book is Gun Violence and Public Life (Paradigm, 2014), co-edited with Ben Agger. He has recently published articles on struggles over sustainability, social scientific methodology, public memorials, international affairs, and environmental politics in Current Sociology, Sustainable Development, New Political Science, International Politics, New Geographies, and The Platypus Review.
Erin L. Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on race and ethnic relations, sociological theory, and political sociology. She is interested in inequalities of race, class, and gender in politics – especially the politics of inclusion/exclusion and political belonging – and she has published articles on the anti-Chinese movement in the late 1800s in the US West, US women’s anti-imperialism during the Philippine-American War, and the theoretical question of who has sovereignty over one’s body in the case of intersex surgical modifications.
John E. O’Brien, former Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Portland State University, Oregon, now independent researcher in Paris, with current research and conferences on institutional systems in the global political economy. In his recent book, Critical Practice: From Voltaire to Foucault, Eagleton and Beyond: Contested Perspectives (SCSS-Brill, 2014), he explores the emergence and reach of the historical-materialist method for cultural critical studies, with that line of inquiry continuing in a manuscript now being completed entitled Critical Judgment: Romantic Resolution from Water Benjamin to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
David Norman Smith, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, is the editor of Marx’s World, a forthcoming volume of Marx’s notes on global capital accumulation and global cultures (Yale University Press, 2015). His many publications – on classical and critical theory, authority and commodity fetishism, ethnocentrism and the Rwandan genocide – include, most recently, Marx’s Capital Illustrated (Haymarket Books, 2014) and Charisma Disenchanted: Max Weber and His Critics (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 2013).
Tony Smith is a Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University. He is the author of numerous works on Marxism, the philosophy of technology, and social theory, including The Logic of Marx’s Capital: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms (1990), Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production (2000), and Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (2005). He also co-edited the recent collection Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic (2014) and has completed the forthcoming Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Normative Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century.
Gabriel Solis is Associate Professor of Music, Anthropology, and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received the PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology from Washington University, St Louis, in 2001. His research on music, memory, and social identities in the United States, Australia, and Papua New Guinea, has been published in journals such as Ethnomusicology, The Musical Quarterly, and Musicultures, and he is the author of Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (University of California Press, 2008), Thelonious Monk Quartet Featuring John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor, with Bruno Nettl, of Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society (University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Lou Turner is Director of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies for the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is co-author of Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought, and he is research and public policy consultant for Developing Communities Project, the largest community organization on the far South Side of Chicago. A colleague of the late Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, he has written extensively on Fanonian, Marxian and Hegelian dialectics. He is currently co-authoring a Critical Introduction to Black Studies with Sundiata Cha-Jua.
Howard Winant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also affiliated with the Black Studies and Chicana/o Studies departments. Winant is the founding director of the UC Center for New Racial Studies (UCCNRS), a Multicampus Research Program Initiative. He is the author of The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (Basic Books, 2001), Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (co-authored with Michael Omi; Routledge, 1994 [1986]) and Stalemate: Political Economic Origins of Supply-Side Policy (Praeger, 1988).
