Lawrence D. Bobo is Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He has served as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. He holds appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Department of African and African American Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of social psychology, inequality, politics, and race. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Science and of the American Philosophical Society. He is also an elected Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a Guggenheim Fellow and Russell Sage Foundation Scholar. In 2012 he received the Cooley-Mead Award from the American Sociological Association for a Career of Distinguished Contributions to Social Psychology. His most recent book Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute (Harvard University Press, 2006, with M. Tuan) received the Outstanding Book Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 2018 and was a finalist for 2007 C. Wright Mills Award.
Chasity Bailey-Fakhoury is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations in the College of Education at Grand Valley State University. She received her A.B. in sociology from the University of Michigan, and from Wayne State University a M.Ed. in secondary social studies education and a Ph.D. in sociology with a specialization in social inequalities. Her research interests focus on African American motherwork in predominantly White schools, and the relationships between gendered racial socialization, gendered racial identity development, and academic achievement.
Ray Block Jr. is an Associate Professor of Political Science and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Block’s research interests include racial, ethnic, and gender group politics, voting behavior, and public opinion. His current work examines how members of non-dominant demographic groups translate their psychological attachment to politics into civic action. Block’s articles have been published in American Politics Research, International Theory, the National Political Science Review, Political Behavior, Politics & Gender, Politics, Groups, & Identities, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Research & Politics, and Social Science Quarterly. In Losing Power: African Americans and Racial Polarization in Tennessee (University of Georgia Press), Block and his coauthor, Sekou M. Franklin of Middle Tennessee State University, investigate the complex relationship between racial polarization, African American political influence, and multiracial coalitions in the Volunteer State.
Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. Bonnette-Bailey’s research interests include Hip Hop culture, political behavior, political attitudes, African American politics, political psychology and public opinion. Her current research examines the impact of political rap music on racial attitudes, and a co-edited volume (with Adolphus Belk Jr.) examines the relationships between Hip Hop culture and social justice. Dr. Bonnette-Bailey, author of Pulse of the People: Rap Music and Black Political Attitudes (University of Pennsylvania Press 2015), has work published in Ethnic Studies Review, New Political Science and a book chapter in Contemporary Public Policy and Social Development in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Through the Prism of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream. In 2017, she hosted the first political Hip Hop conference at Georgia State University entitled, Behind the Music: Hip Hop and Social Justice, which examined the ways in which social justice is addressed and expressed within Hip Hop culture. In 2018, she was a Nasir Jones/W. E. B. Du Bois fellow with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Amanda Barrett Cox is a PhD candidate in sociology and education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is broadly focused on how organizations transform and reproduce social inequality. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic study of two attempts to redistribute power across institutional roles—a philanthropic foundation seeking to transfer control over a portion of its grant-making to a community-based board, and a democratic school in which students and teachers have equal voice in decisions. Other articles based on her study of Launch have appeared in Sociology of Education, Sociological Forum, and Symbolic Interaction.
Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and director of The Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University, where she is also a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Ecklund’s research explores how individuals use racial, gender, and immigrant identities to bring changes to religious and scientific institutions. She has published five books and over sixty research articles on this topic. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, Templeton World Charity Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation. In 2018 she gave the Gifford Lecture in Scotland.
Herbert J. Gans is the Robert S. Lynd Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Columbia University. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Social Planning and has taught at Columbia University since 1971. His primary research interests are: poverty and antipoverty policy; race and ethnicity; urban democracy and equality; and the news media. He is the author of over a dozen books, his first being The Urban Villagers (1962), his most recent, Sociology and Social Policy (2017). He has held Guggenheim, Marshall, and Media Studies Center Fellowships and a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholarship and received ASA’s Distinguished Scholarship award and lifetime merit awards from its Migration and Urban sections. He is a past President of the American Sociological Association and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Brandon A. Jackson is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, as well as the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Arkansas. His research employs ethnographic methods to examine emotion cultures and social support among black men. This work has won awards from the Association of Black Sociologists and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and has appeared in the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Sociological Inquiry, Symbolic Interaction, and the Journal of Negro Education. He is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “Brotherhood University: Black Men and Social Mobility on a College Campus.” Born and raised in Texas, he received his B.A. in sociology from Southern Methodist University and his Ph.D. from Florida State University.
Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She received her B.A. in Government from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press 2000) won two book awards from the American Political Science Association. Her second book, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press 2015), also won a book award from the American Political Science Association. She is a past recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
Rory Kramer is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University. His research focuses on racial inequality, residential segregation, and spatial analysis of neighborhood dynamics. He also researches racial disparities in police violence, the relationship between racial identity and inequality, and social mobility via elite education. His work has appeared in a variety of journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Sociology of Education, Law and Society Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
Harwood K. McClerking is currently (in the 2018-2019 academic year) a Visiting Scholar in the Political Science Department at the University of Michigan. His Ph.D. is in Political Science from the University of Michigan, and he specializes in the areas of Black politics, racial & ethnic group politics, political behavior, and public opinion. He has published multiple articles and book chapters on racial politics in America. For example, his work includes two articles in the Journal of Politics (one examining race and representation in Congress and the other on how race and party cues influence perceptions of racism). He also has two articles in American Politics Research (the first examining local context and Black empowerment and the second examining how racial transcendence may be gained and lost by Black celebrities). Two of his most treasured articles (in PS in 2008 and Research & Politics in 2016) examine themes brought to light by the seminal work of one of his dissertation advisers, the late Prof. Hanes Walton, Jr. McClerking is currently investigating how race and Black culture are represented in American media sources.
C. Shawn McGuffey, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. His scholarly work primarily highlights how race, gender, sexuality and social class both constrain and create the choices survivors pursue in the aftermath of trauma. His new project focuses on Black LGBT civic engagement. McGuffey is the recipient of three American Sociological Association section awards: the 2006 Sally Hacker Award, a 2009 “Best Research Article Award,” and a 2016 “Distinguished Article Award.” In 2016 he also received the Kimberlé Crenshaw Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He has also written op-ed and guest blog essays on Bashir and the International Criminal Court, the Orlando nightclub massacre, and Confederate monuments among others.
Donald Mitchell, Jr., is Professor of Education and Chair of the M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership and Social Justice in the Annsley Frazier Thornton School of Education at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds a Ph.D. in educational policy and administration with a concentration in higher education from the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities. Mitchell’s scholarship explores race, gender, identity intersections, and intersectionality within higher education settings. He is lead editor of Intersectionality & Higher Education: Theory, Research and Praxis (2014), Student Involvement: Implications for Diverse Student Populations (2015), and the forthcoming second edition of Intersectionality & Higher Education: Theory, Research and Praxis, all published by Peter Lang.
A graduate of Grinnell College (B.A.), University of Michigan Law School (J.D.), and Yale University (Ph.D.), Angela Onwuachi-Willig is Dean and Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. Previously, she served as Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley and the Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. She is author of According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family and numerous articles, appearing in leading law journals like the Yale Law Journal and California Law Review. She is a former Iowa Supreme Court finalist, a recipient of Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Award and the AALS’s Clyde Ferguson and Derrick Bell Awards, plus an elected member of the American Law Institute.
Pamela Prickett is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include ethnography, urban sociology, sociology of religion, gender, death and dying. Her first book draws on more than six years of fieldwork inside an African American-led mosque in South Central Los Angeles to show the everyday struggles of a community that strives to make Islam their blueprint for combating social inequality. This research also appears in Gender & Society, City & Community, and Social Compass. Her next book is an ethnographic study of people who go unclaimed after death and the communities that form to mourn them.
Brianna Remster is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University. She studies formal social control through an inequality lens, including inequalities in criminal justice experiences—most recently police violence—and how criminal justice contact, primarily incarceration, creates and reproduces social inequalities. Her work appears in Social Forces, Law and Society Review, Socius, and Justice Quarterly among other outlets.
Louise Seamster is a postdoctoral teaching associate in Sociology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She earned her PhD in Sociology at Duke University in 2016, an MA in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research, and a BA at Vassar College. She has published articles and other media on racial politics, debt, racial progress, and the Flint Water Crisis. Her research centers on the interactive financial and symbolic factors reproducing racial inequality across multiple domains. She is working on a book manuscript on the people, politics, stories and emotions propping up the “extraction machine” in Benton Harbor.
Alicia D. Simmons is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University. Her research examines the intersections of media, race, and politics in the United States, investigating the nature of Americans’ racial attitudes toward Blacks, their opinions about public policies that obviously or tacitly invoke race, and how these attitudes are created, triggered, altered, and reinforced by the news media. She is a multi-method scholar, using surveys, experiments, and content analyses. Her work has appeared in journals such as Social Forces and Sociological Methodology.
Sandra Susan Smith is a Professor of the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in studies of urban poverty and joblessness, social capital and social networks, trust and cooperation, and more recently, the front end of criminal case processing. She has published a number of articles and one book, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor (Russell Sage Foundation), on this and related topics. Smith is currently on the advisory board of the Y Combinator Research’s Basic Income Project and the Misdemeanor Justice Project. She was a member of Harvard University’s Executive Session on Community Corrections; Interim Director of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment; and chair of the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). She currently chairs Berkeley Sociology and is completing her second book project on ethnoracial differences in the deployment of social capital for job-finding.
Cleve V. Tinsley IV is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice. His research explores critical understandings of social scientific and historical approaches to the study of religion, particularly African-American religion. His current research focuses on religion and identity construction in African-American communities. In addition to being a research fellow with The Religion and Public Life Program, Tinsley is also a graduate and teaching assistant at the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning at Rice University.
