Jessica Autumn Brown is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston and the interim director of the UH Center for Immigration Research (CIR). She works in the areas of gender, immigration, race and ethnicity, citizenship and transnational sociology. Her current research is an ethnographic examination of citizenship and civics education in US public high schools serving large first and second-generation immigrant communities. Her articles have appeared in Gender & Society, Feminist Formations, and the Journal of Women’s History.
Anna Johansson is Senior Lecturer at University West (http://www.hv.se) with a PhD in Sociology (1999) from the University of Gothenburg. Her areas of research are mainly resistance studies, critical fat studies, and gender studies. Among her most recent publications are ‘Teaching Power and Social Difference: Practicing Anti-Oppressive Education in the University Classroom’ (2013) (with A. Theodorsson) and ‘Dimensions of Everyday Resistance: The Palestinian Sumūd’ (2015) (with S. Vinthagen). She is currently part of a research project (founded by the Swedish Research Council) titled ‘The Futures of Genders and Sexualities: Cultural Products, Transnational Spaces and Emerging Communities’. The study will follow three cultural products: the rainbow flag, manga, and the veil, examining their role in the making of transnational communities which reiterate, resist, and recast gender and sexuality norms.
Daniel Krier (PhD, University of Kansas) teaches sociological theory at Iowa State University. His research specializations include political economy and critical theory in the continental tradition. Recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Rural Social Sciences, Critical Sociology, Current Perspectives on Social Theory and Fast Capitalism. Books include Speculative Capitalism: Stock Market Power and Corporate Change (2005: SUNY Press), Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique (co-edited with Mark Worrell, forthcoming: Brill), and NASCAR, Sturgis and the New Economy of Spectacle (co-edited with Mark Worrell, forthcoming: Palgrave Macmillan) and The Social Ontology of Capitalism (co-edited with Mark Worrell, forthcoming: Palgrave Macmillan.
Alessandro Olsaretti completed his PhD at McGill University with a thesis on Gramsci. He has previously published in the Radical History Review, Social History, The International History Review and the Journal of Classical Sociology. He lives in Montreal.
Theodore Pride completed his PhD at Wayne State University with a thesis titled ‘Resident-led Urban Agriculture and the Hegemony of Neoliberal Community Development’ that examines how the utilization of urban gardening as a community development tool by low-income residents can produce exclusionary spaces through eco-gentrification. It challenges the concept of human agency as resistance in resident-led community building. His research focuses on the role of urbanization in social change under capitalist and racist social relations and accumulation.
Gretchen Purser is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on day labor and temporary staffing, urban housing and poverty, and the politics of punishment.
Adrián Sotelo Valencia is a sociologist, researcher, and lecturer in Latin American Studies at the Centre for Latin American Studies (CELA) of the Social and Political Sciences Faculty of the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM). He is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) of the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT) and an Honorary Professor at the Universidad Ricardo Palma of Peru. He is author of numerous books and other writings on the sociology of Latin American development and is a frequent contributor to www.rebelion.org. His most recent book is México (des)cargado. Del Mexico’s moment al Mexico’s disaster (Editorial Miguel Ángel Porrúa-FISYP-Posgrado en Estudios Latinoamericanos, México, 2015). His blog address is: http://sotlova.wix.com/adriani
William J. Swart, Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in sociological theory, deviance and Native American Studies at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. His work considers the broad influence of globalization on local politics, economics, and identities. His most recent research explores the commodification of the Sturgis, South Dakota, Motorcycle Rally and the shifting economic and cultural dynamics of spectacle from pre-modernity to post-modernity. His other research examines the role of globalization in Irish national identity and the influence of the European Union on European food politics.
Tom Vickers, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Nottingham Trent University and co-convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Activism in Sociology Forum, has a keen commitment to social justice and anti-oppressive social interventions. A related set of themes run through Tom’s research across different projects, concerning: the impact of international, national and local economic and political contexts on policies affecting migrants and ethnic minorities; the interaction between policy, professional practice, and community action; and the creative use of qualitative methods to bring into focus voices which are often marginalized or ignored in policy debates.
Stellan Vinthagen is Professor of Sociology, a scholar-activist, and the Inaugural Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also a Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social and Behavioural Studies, University West, and a researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. He is co-leader of the Resistance Studies Group at the University of Gothenburg (www.globalstudies.gu.se) and co-founder of the Resistance Studies Network (www.resistancestudies.org), as well as a council member of War Resisters International and academic advisor to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). His research is focused on resistance, power, social movements, nonviolent action, conflict transformation and social change. He has since 1980 been an educator, organizer and activist in several countries, and has participated in more than 30 nonviolent civil disobedience actions, for which he has served in total more than one year in prison.
