Alma Bravo received her Master of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Lamar University in Beaumont, TX, in 2013. She received her undergraduate degree with honors in Sociology.
Cassandra Chaney is an Associate Professor in Child and Family Studies at Louisiana State University (LSU). Dr Chaney examines the structure and functional dynamics of black family life, which includes emotional closeness and commitment among dating, cohabiting, and married black couples. Furthermore, she examines the influence of religiosity and/or spirituality among blacks as well as the representation of black masculinity and femininity in popular forms of mass media (i.e. films, television sitcoms, music videos, and song lyrics). Her scholarly work involves studying national policies related to strengthening the number and quality of black marriages as well as how heightened rates of incarceration, unemployment, weakened family structures, and racism affect black families and communities. In addition to publishing several sole, first-authored, and collaborative manuscripts in various national and international journals, she has also presented her research during local, state, and national conferences. Most important, her scholarship is rooted in a strengths-based perspective and is devoted to emphasizing the various ways that black families remain resilient in the face of many historical and contemporary challenges.
Barbara Harris Combs is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Clark Atlanta University and the author of From Selma to Montgomery: The Long March to Freedom, a book about the Selma campaign for voting rights. The book chronicles the marches, placing them in the context of the long Civil Rights Movement, and considers the legacy of the Voting Rights Act, drawing parallels with contemporary issues of enfranchisement. Her research focuses on the role place (as a geographical, social/cultural, and class construct) has on modern identity formation and human relations, especially race relations.
Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. His articles have appeared in Race, Ethnicity and Education, Third World Quarterly, and the Journal of Historical Sociology. He is the author of Reimagining Black Difference and Politics in Brazil: From Racial Democracy to Multiculturalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Daniel J. Delgado is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Salem State University. His research focuses on the processes of racialization experienced by Latinos and other racialized groups. Recently he co-authored an article on multiracial identities. His current project explores the discourse used by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office regarding Latinos living in Arizona. He lives just outside Boston, MA.
Rickard Lalander is Associate Professor and PhD in Latin American Studies, University of Helsinki. Since the 1990s he has worked as researcher and teacher at Stockholm University, and since 2013 at the Department of Political Science at the same university. Lalander is Associate Researcher of the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, and has collaborated with a number of Latin American universities. He has published broadly on democracy, development, identity politics and social movements in the Andean countries. Lalander is author of Suicide of the Elephants? Venezuelan Decentralization between Partyarchy and Chavismo (University of Helsinki, 2004).
Elgin Mannion is currently a Professor at Western Illinois University. Originally from Europe with undergraduate degrees in music and classic languages, she earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of Kentucky in 2003. Her dissertation and applied work focuses on regional economic development and theoretical changes in economic paradigms. Social theory and the classic sociological and economic theorists have become a lifelong love and preoccupation, and she has always been fascinated by how European theorists are interpreted and applied in other countries, which works are translated and incorporated, and which works are overlooked.
Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge; previously she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle. Her research and publications have focused on the lived experience of ‘race’, racism and mestizaje in Mexico; anti-racism, activism and research collaborations; and issues around beauty, emotions, feminist theory and visual methodologies. She is currently completing a book on the everyday experience of racism in Mexico and has published in a variety of journals and edited collections. Together with Prof. Peter Wade (University of Manchester) she will be running the UK-ESRC funded project ‘Latin American Antiracism in a “Post-Racial” Age’ (2017–19).
Jenell Navarro is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her primary areas of research are Indigenous Studies of the Americas, Indigenous Feminism and Hip-Hop Studies. Her most recent publication is titled ‘Solarize-ing Native Hip-Hop: Native Feminist Land Ethics and Cultural Resistance’ (2014) in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society.
Roberto José Ortiz studied at the University of Puerto Rico and is currently a PhD student in Sociology at Binghamton University, SUNY. He researches mainly in the fields of political economy and political ecology, with an emphasis on Latin American development. His dissertation research is centered on understanding the connection between oil and uneven development in the 1970s.
Louis Prisock is an Assistant Professor in the Africana and American Studies Departments at Rutgers University. Louis is working on a forthcoming book entitled The Inescapability of Race: African American Participation in Conservative Political, Intellectual, Social, and Religious Movements. His research areas are political sociology, with an emphasis on African-American conservatism, urban sociology, and economic sociology.
Ray Von Robertson is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University in Tallahassee, FL. He joined the faculty at FAMU in August 2015. He was born and raised in Dallas, TX, and received his doctorate in Sociology from Oklahoma State University, where he studied social and racial inequality and crime and deviance. He has written and published scholarly works in the areas of critical race theory, police brutality, birthing options for African-American women, boxing, the Black Seminoles, African-American college students, and Latina/o college students.
Emiko Saldívar Tanaka is Associate Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara; previously she was a Professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. She is the author of Practicas Cotidianas del Estado: Una Etnografia del Indigenismo. Her current work focuses on race and anti-racism in Mexico and Latin America, with a special emphasis on engaged scholarship and the use of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. She has published in a variety of journals and works in different collaborative projects.
Jared Sexton is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Darcy Tetreault is a Professor and researcher at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico, in the Department of Development Studies, and an Adjunct Professor at St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. His doctoral thesis was awarded the national-level (Mexico) Arturo Warman Prize in 2008. He is the co-editor of Los conflictos socioambientales y las alternativas de la sociedad civil (2012), with Heliodora Ochoa García and Eduardo Hernández González; Poverty and Development in Latin America: Public Policies and Development Pathways (2013), with Henry Veltmeyer; and Senderos de la insustentabilidad: Degradación humana y ambiental en el capitalismo neoliberal (2015), with Guadalupe Margarita González Hernández and Humberto Márquez Covarrubias.
João H. Costa Vargas is an Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at University of Texas, Austin. His publications include State of White Supremacy (2011), with Moon-Kie Jung and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.
Miguel Ángel Vite Pérez holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Alicante, Spain. His interests include violence and surveillance in Latin America, with a focus on Mexico. He has published work on the relations between violence and social inequality in Mexico. Recent books are: La Nueva Desigualdad Social en México (ed. Miguel Ángel Porrúa – Cámara de Diputados, 2007) and México, Democracia y Desigualdad Social. Un Enfoque Sociológico (ed. Miguel Ángel Porrúa – Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, 2011).
Connie Wun is currently the Director of Research at the DataCenter and a Research Justice at the Intersections Scholar at Mills College. She obtained her PhD from the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and she recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research interests include the politics of school discipline and punishment, racial and gender violence, psychoanalysis, and critical theory in education. Her work examines the relationship between school discipline, policing, and racial and gender violence as they affect black and non-black girls of color. Connie’s work has previously been supported by the National Science Foundation, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Office, UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender, and the Haas Diversity Research Initiative. She has published in Educational Policy, Educational Philosophy and Theory, The Journal for Curriculum and Teaching, Berkeley Review of Education, and The Feminist Wire.
