Marcus Banks is a political economist. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a casual academic at RMIT University in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing.
Tom Barnes is an economic sociologist and senior research fellow at Australian Catholic University (ACU). His research primarily focuses on insecure, precarious and informal work in Asia (especially India) and Australia. He is currently involved in two Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded projects on the demise of Australian automotive manufacturing and the impact on workers and communities in closure-affected regions, as well as research on labour organizing in warehousing and logistics. He completed his PhD in political economy at the University of Sydney in 2011 and has expertise on economic development in India. He has published in several journals, including the Journal of Development Studies and Journal of Sociology, and written two books: Informal Labour in Urban India: Three Cities, Three Journeys (Routledge, 2015) and Making Cars in the New India: Industry, Precarity and Informality (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Jérôme Beauchez is Professor of sociology at the Université de Strasbourg (France). Between 2013 and 2017, he coordinated a research programme on daily resistance to domination funded by the French National Research Agency. In this context, he has conducted and directed ethnographic investigations with different marginalized populations, looking at their capacity to resist adversity at the intersection of gender-, class-, and race-related domination. He authored several books and articles published in international journals like Sociology, Ethnography or the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.
Shannon Elizabeth Bell is Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Her research is broadly focused on issues of environmental justice and injustice, with a particular interest in the ways that environmentally destructive industries manipulate and mobilize gendered, classed, and racialized identities to maintain power in the face of increasing public awareness of the risks associated with their practices. She is author of two books: Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia (MIT Press, 2016; winner of the Society for Human Ecology’s Gerald L. Young Book Award and the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award) and Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2013; winner of the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award). She is also the 2017 recipient of the Rural Sociological Society’s Excellence in Research Award.
Ignasi Bernat is a critical criminologist and activist based in Barcelona. He has just finished his PhD at the University of Gerona. His academic articles have been published in Critical Criminology, Crítica Penal y Poder and the Oñati Socio-legal Series. He is co-editor of Building a New Catalonia: self-determination and emancipation (Bella Caledonia and Pol:len, 2019).
Dina Bowman is an economic sociologist and applied social researcher. She is Principal Research Fellow, Work and Economic Security, in the Research and Policy Centre at the Brotherhood of St Laurence. She is also an Honorary Principal Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Yang Chen is a lecturer in the history department of Shanghai University and the executive director of the Center for Turkish Studies of Shanghai University.
Simon Copland is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU), and has a Master’s in Science Communication
Sue Dockstader is a Sociology and Environmental Studies, Science, and Policy PhD graduate student at the University of Oregon. Before entering graduate school, she studied alternative energy and was certified in photovoltaic installation. She is a veteran wildland firefighter with fifteen years of experience. As a former activist, she participated in blockades, strikes, civil disobedience, and numerous activities in struggles as diverse as the fight against homophobia, for divestment from South Africa, and for farmworker rights. She teaches courses in environmental studies and science and sociology.
Claire Farrugia is a Research Officer at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University, Melbourne and an Honorary Post-Doctoral Associate in the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She has worked in research and policy and has a particular interest in the intersection between informal, social spaces of support and formalised, social service provision for marginalised communities. She has experience teaching and guest lecturing in qualitative social research methods, gender and sexuality, race, multiculturalism and migration. Current interests include culturally engaged and reciprocal research methods and the application of critical sociology and human geography approaches to the study of health, education and social service delivery.
David B Feldman is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds an MA in International Relations and Diplomacy from the American Graduate School in Paris. His research interests include global political economy, transnational migration, and political sociology, and he is writing his dissertation on the regulation of migrant and immigrant labor in the United States. His work has appeared in the Journal of World-Systems Research; Politique Américaine; La Revue des Droits de l’Homme; and The Journal of International Relations, Peace Studies, and Development, for which he also serves on the editorial staff. He has also published in outlets such as Jacobin, Truthout, Counterpunch and Spectrezine.
Helen Forbes-Mewett is Senior Lecturer and researcher in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, Australia. Dr Forbes-Mewett is the Discipline Head of Sociology and Deputy Director of the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre. She holds a BA (Psychology and Humanities), BA (Hons in Sociology, First Class) and PhD from Monash. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on human security, migration, cultural diversity, international education and social cohesion in relation to both migrant and receiving communities. Dr Forbes-Mewett is a member of the Victorian Multicultural Commission Regional Advisory Committee. She is also Editorial Board member and Associate Editor for the Journal of International Students and Editorial Board Member, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Education. Her work has been published widely in highly regarded scholarly academic journals. Her books include: International Student Security (2010), International Students and Crime (2015), The New Security: Individual, Community and Cultural Experiences (2018), and Vulnerability in a Mobile World (2019).
Ryan Gunderson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Justice Studies in the Department of Sociology and Gerontology at Miami University. His current research projects concern the potential effectiveness of proposed solutions to environmental problems; the social dimensions and environmental impacts of technology; and the renewal of classical and mid-twentieth century sociological theory.
Kieran Hegarty is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, and Research Support Officer at the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre, Monash University. He has degrees in Sociology and Information Systems, and his current research focuses on how Australia’s major cultural heritage institutions have responded to increasing cultural and linguistic diversity.
Sean Hier is Professor in the Sociology Department, University of Victoria, Canada. His research focuses on moral panics and social problems. Hier has recently published papers on good moral panics (2017), digitally mediated moral panics (2018), the changing dynamics of moral panic claims-making activities (2019), and the contextual compromise in social problems research (2019). His current research focuses on obscure serial murderer events.
Elizabeth Humphrys is a lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research concerns: neoliberalism and anti-politics; heat stress, climate change and work; and, the deaths of 35 workers when the West Gate Bridge collapsed in 1970. Her book How Labour Built Neoliberalism was published in 2019 in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences series (Brill/Haymarket).
William Jefferies completed his PhD in 2014 which was the first history of the application of national income measurements to the centrally planned economies. It was externally examined by Simon Clarke and published by Routledge in 2015. William has developed an original critique of Sraffa’s physical price system, published in Critical Sociology, Piero Sraffa and the Production of Commodities by Means of Magicin 2015. This led to a subsequent exchange also in Critical Sociology with Gary Mongiovi. William has published a further article on the same theme in 2019 in Capital and Class, Piero Sraffa’s Physical Price System and Reproduction without Production. William has also had articles on the measure of the transition period of centrally planned economies to capitalism and the impact of these issues on assessments of globalisation in the Review of Radical Political Economics and the Journal of International Critical Thought. William teaches economics at SOAS and business at Anglia Ruskin.
Nieves Moreno obtained her PhD from the Autónoma University of Madrid (UAM) in the programme of Literary, Artistic and Cultural Studies, special field in Film History. To conduct her PhD thesis she has been a research fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo in 2007-2009, sponsored by the Japanese Government Monbukagakusho Scholarship, and twice sponsored by the Japan Foundation in 2010-2011 and 2015. She is also graduated in Drama Studies by the University of Madrid (RESAD) and graduated in Japanese Studies by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). She is currently a research fellow in Complutense University of Madrid in GIA, Group of Asian Research at the Faculty of History.
Jason C. Mueller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is also a William F. Podlich Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. His broad areas of interest are in the domains of political economy, state theory, and post-colonial development. His earlier work examined the root causes of political violence in Somalia, and his dissertation explores the relationship between state strategy, human rights, diamond extraction, and accumulation in several Southern African countries.
Freya Newman is a research assistant at the Climate Justice Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney (UTS). In 2018 she completed her honours thesis at UTS on heat stress in the NSW construction industry, for which she was awarded first class honours and the University medal.
Fernando Ortiz-Moya is a Policy Researcher in the City Taskforce, the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan. His research has focused on global transformations of our urban systems, particularly on shrinking cities, exploring the responses given in different countries to the problems generated by urban decay. At the same time, Fernando studies cities from a cinematic perspective, analyzing how the film media portrays the ongoing changes in our built environment. He has a Doctorate in Architecture from the University of Tokyo, an MSc in Urban Studies from the University of Edinburgh, and an MArch in Architecture from the Technical University of Madrid.
Claire Parfitt is a doctoral candidate and a postgraduate teaching fellow in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the interaction of finance and social movements, and in particular, on the translation of ethics into financial risks through the frame of responsible investment. She has published in several journals and in the popular press, as well as undertaking commissioned research on a range of subjects. Claire previously worked as a lawyer and as a trade union campaigner. It was in the context of applying investor pressure to social movement campaigning that Claire became interested in the contradictions of responsible investment as a form of political action. Claire is a co-convenor the Work, Labour and Economy group within The Australian Sociological Association and an active member of her trade union, the National Tertiary Education Union.
Kristin Plys is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto specializing in political economy of the Global South. She has held several visiting appointments including at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India and the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. She is currently working on a book with Charles Lemert entitled, Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (under contract with Routledge), along with a sole authored book on resistance against India’s Emergency entitled, Brewing Resistance (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
Alfredo Saad-Filho is Professor of Political Economy and International Development at King’s College London. Previously, he was Professor of Political Economy at SOAS University of London, and Senior Economic Affairs Officer at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Alfredo has degrees in Economics from the Universities of Brasília (Brazil) and London (SOAS) and has taught in universities and research institutions in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mozambique, Switzerland and the UK. His interests include the political economy of development, industrial policy, neoliberalism, democracy, alternative economic policies, Latin American political and economic development, inflation and stabilisation, and the labour theory of value and its applications.
Allegra Clare Schermuly is Research Fellow in Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Monash University. She has an industry background in nursing, and uses her interdisciplinary skills in migration, employment and health-related research. Dr Schermuly is currently involved in a large-scale, international study looking at the career development prospects for migrant nurses in Australia. Her other research interests include the challenge for public institutions ― such as law enforcement and healthcare ― to remain fit for purpose in rapidly changing, multicultural societies and the social inequalities that persist in access to justice and healthcare despite advances in digital technologies.
Steven Schmidt is a Ph.D. student in the sociology department at the University of California, Irvine. He is a qualitative researcher with interests in housing, political economy, and cultural sociology. His previous research uses interviews with urbanists working in Mexico City to articulate how participatory democratic planning initiatives paradoxically exclude local knowledge. His dissertation project examines how renters use their social ties to move through housing markets in Los Angeles, with a particular focus on how unaffordable housing recasts residents’ interpersonal relationships. His work has been supported by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the U.S. (UC-MEXUS), as well as the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF-GRFP)
Ben Spies-Butcher teaches Economy and Society and is Head of the Sociology Department at Macquarie University. Ben completed his PhD in Economics at the University of Sydney while working in the non-government sector on issues of human rights. His research focuses the political economy of social policy and the welfare state, particularly how economic and political change shape social policy financing. In addition to his academic publications, Ben is a regular contributor to The Conversation and is a Social Policy Whisperer for website, Power to Persuade. Ben is a Research Associate at the Retirement Policy and Research Centre at the University of Auckland and a member of the Policy Advisory Group for COTA NSW. He was awarded the 2017 Glenda Powell National Travelling Fellowship by the Australian Association of Gerontology.
David Whyte is Professor of socio-legal studies at the University of Liverpool where he researches the relationship between law and power in capitalist societies. He is co-author of The Corporate Criminal (Routledge, 2015, with Steve Tombs) and Corporate Human Rights Violations (Routledge, 2017 with Stefanie Khoury). He is co-editor of Building a New Catalonia: self-determination and emancipation (Bella Caledonia and Pol:len, 2019).
Sally A. Weller is a geographical political economist and regional geographer in the University of South Australia Business School. Her research interests span labour market change, industrial restructuring, urban and regional development, retrenchment and job loss.
Djemila Zeneidi is Research Director at CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research). She is a social and cultural geographer, particularly interested in the making of landscape, identity, citizenship, mobility, and resistance. She uses an ethnographic approach to explore these questions, focusing especially on homelessness, subcultures in cities, and labour migration. Her latest book has been published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan (Mobility & Politics series) Gender, Temporary Work, and Migration Management. Global Food and Utilitarian Migration in Huelva, Spain.
