Anthony Alessandrini is an associate professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, and an affiliate faculty member of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2008-2009. His work focuses on postcolonial literature and theory and the connection between Middle Eastern literature and culture and postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He is the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, and has published or forthcoming articles in Arab Studies Journal, Cultural Studies, Diaspora, Foucault Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, The Journal of Pan African Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the minnesota review,andReconstruction, as well as in the anthologies A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy, and World Bank Literature. We Must Find Something Different: Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politicswill be published in 2012. He is a Co-Editor of JadaliyyaEzine, an online publication focusing on the politics and culture of the Middle East.

Colette Daiute is Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Dr. Daiute does research on the social and cognitive development of children at risk in the U.S. and in international contexts. Colette Daiute has done research on children’s social conflicts, conflict resolution, children’s development in war and post-war contexts, children’s rights, literacy development, writing, and uses of interactive technology. Working from the perspective of socio-historical activity theory, Dr. Daiute is especially interested in children’s participation in social and intellectual practices as influenced by political and economic factors. Colette Daiute’s recent book publications include Human Development and Political Violence(Cambridge University Press, 2010), International Perspectives on Youth Conflict and Development(Oxford University Press, 2006), Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society(Sage Publications, 2004), and The Development of Literacy through Social Interaction(Jossey-Bass, 1993). She has published numerous articles in journals, such as the recent article, “Young people’s stories of conflict and development in post-war Croatia” in Narrative Inquiry, 2005. Dr. Daiute has also worked on the design of numerous programs for vulnerable youth, including violence prevention, literacy, and youth research curricula. She was, for example, the head academic consultant for the television series Ghostwriter. In addition to courses in her areas of research, she teaches and does workshops on narrative psychology, discourse analysis, qualitative research, and methods of inquiry into human development and globalization.

Sujatha Fernandes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her research interests include hip hop culture, neoliberalism, state-society relations, urban public space, and the role of culture in social movements, with an area focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. She has been the recipient of various fellowships, including a Wilson-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship at PrincetonUniversity’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2003-2006) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities,CUNY Graduate Center (2007-2008). In 2008, she was awarded the Feliks Gross Award from the CUNY Academy for Arts and Sciences in recognition of outstanding research. She is the author of  Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, 2006) and  Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela(Duke University Press, 2010). Her most recent book is  Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation(Verso, 2011). She is currently working on a new project exploring the unprecedented participation of everyday social movement actors in legislative advocacy in New York City.

Robert Garot is Assistant Professor with tenure, Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His book, Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets, published by NYU Press in 2010, has been reviewed in Teacher’s College Record, Critical Sociology, and Contemporary Sociology,and it received Honorable Mention for the Robert E. Park Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2007 and 2008, he conducted fieldwork in Tuscany on racialization practices and the experiences of immigrants. His datasets include 174 days of participant observation at services for immigrants in Tuscany, and interviews with 72 immigrants to Italy from 23 countries, 36 men and 36 women, as well as 43 lawyers and other service providers for immigrants, regarding immigrants’ experiences with the law. Roughly two-thirds of interviews with immigrants and all the interviews with service providers were conducted in Italian. He observed 166 cases of immigrants’ service encounters with attorneys, over a period of 155 hours in city-sponsored immigration service centers in Florence, Pistoia, and Prato, and the CGIL trade union in Pistoia. He also attended eleven local, regional and national conferences in Italy lasting a day or more, on such themes as immigration and racism.

Helen Kapstein is tenured in the English Department at John Jay College, The City University of New York. She earned her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her areas of interest include postcolonial and contemporary British literatures, cultural and media studies, and southern African literature and culture. Her current projects include A New Kind of Safari, on tourism in postcolonial literature and culture, and “Coffins, Corpses and Wheelchairs”: Mass Hysteria and Postcolonial Constitutions.

Michael Menser first started teaching at Brooklyn College as an adjunct in 1995, became full time in 2003, and was tenured in 2009. He recently served on the BC Sustainability Council and the Provost’s Task Force on City-Based Sustainability Education. He advises the BC Coffee Collective (the student-run cafe in the Student Center) and the Students for Global Justice club and is president of the Participatory Budgeting Project. He is also a member of the doctoral faculty in Earth and Environmental Sciences and Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Peter Ranis is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center & York College.  He has been a member of graduate faculty since 1988, a York College Professor since 1968 and an Adjunct Professor at the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies between 1983-1988.  Previously he taught at the University of New Mexico and SUNY, Stony Brook. He has over 75 publications in various areas of Western Hemisphere social science.  He has published four books among them Clases, Democracia y Trabajo en la Argentina Contemporánea: Los Valores de los Trabajadores del Gran Buenos Aires(1997), Class, Democracy and Labor in Contemporary Argentina(1995) and Argentine Workers: Peronism and Contemporary Class Consciousness(1992). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Politics, Latin American Research Review, Studies in Comparative International Development, Desarrollo Económico, Latin American Politics and Society, Labor Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Socialism and Democracy, Current History, Polity and New Political Scienceamong others. Currently, Professor Ranis is examining the role of alternative labor movements in civil society.  He is studying the recuperated enterprise and factory movements and worker producer cooperatives in Argentina.  Within the United States, he is exploring the potential use of eminent domain and worker cooperatives as a labor strategy in defense against worker unemployment and poverty. Ranis’s latest publications include “Worker-Run U.S. Factories and Enterprises: The Example of Argentine Cooperatives” in Kawano (ed.) Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet, 2010; “Argentine Worker Cooperatives in Civil Society: A Challenge to Capital-Labor Relations,”Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, March 2010;  “Movement of Worker Recuperated Factories and Enterprises in Argentina,” in International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, 2009; “Eminent Domain: Unused Tool for American Labor?” in Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society,” June 2007; “Revolt against Neo-Liberalism: Argentina’s Factory Takeovers” in Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Spring 2006; and “Argentina’s Worker-Occupied Factories and Enterprises” in Socialism and Democracy, November 2005.

Carolina Muñoz Proto is a Chilean doctoral candidate in the Social/Personality Psychology Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research, based on the methodology of participatory action research, explores the psychosocial significance of nonviolence activism and the symbolic, material, and intergenerational implications of imprisonment and post-prison college. She has studied cross-cultural mentoring relationships as sites for effective alliance building and cooperation. Carolina was a recipient of The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Applied Social Issues Internship (2009-2010). She is currently a research fellow at the CUNY New Media Lab. Carolina is affiliated with the Public Science Project at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Jeremy Rayner is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and has served as an Associate Researcher with the Instituto de Investigaciones Socialesat the University of Costa Rica. He is currently writing his dissertation on the evolution of contention over the Central American Free Trade Agreement in Costa Rica, based on extended fieldwork supported by the Wenner Gren and National Science Foundations. His research interests include the globalization of property regimes, contentious democratic imaginaries, and cultural histories of state formation.

Joshua Keton received his BA in Philosophy from Temple University. He is currently a doctoral student in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and a teaching fellow at Brooklyn College. He has served as a reviewer for the Journal of Social Philosophy and Assistant to the Director of the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute. His current research focus is on human rights and their relation to social and global justice, international law, constitutionalism, and environmental ethics.

Fabio Mattioli obtained his BA in Political Philosophy from Florence University (Italy) and his MA in Social Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris France). Before joining the PhD program in Anthropology, he has been visiting researcher at the university Ss Cyril and Methodius of Skopje, Rep. of Macedonia. Fabio is interested in questions of Urban Anthropology, Aesthetics, Consumption, and Citizenship. He is currently exploring the articulation of political economy and subjective experience, looking at how the production of space translates into subjectivity. His secret dream is to learn how to prepare burek.

Kamran Moshref is a second-year doctoral student in the Political Science program at the CUNY Graduate Center, a Student Fellow in the 2012-2013 Mellon-Saywer Seminar on “Democratic Citizenship and the Recognition of Cultural Differences”, and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Queens College, where he teaches International Relations. His research interests include theories of sovereignty and constituent power, globalization and political theory, Marxism(s), materialism and collective subjectivity, and middle-east politics.

Annie Xibos Spencer is a doctoral student in geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. Annie’s research explores differentiated spaces of debt and dispossession in post-industrial North America. A native of Florida, Spencer’s work examines the lived experience of being rendered surplus and the quest for livelihood and life-making in the post-Keynesian, post-NAFTA U.S. Sunbelt. Spencer holds an MA in international economics and has worked as a researcher in international development. Annie is a teaching fellow at Hunter College, teaching courses in economic geography.

Frances Tran is a second-year doctoral candidate in the English program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current research examines how affect and aesthetics enable us to re-imagine the spatio-temporal dimensions of globalization and thus to envision alternative transnational and transcultural connections across categories of difference. She is especially interested in how Asian American cultural productions allow us to imagine new political possibilities for solidarity in an age of globalization. Her other research interests include Asian American and Asian diasporic studies, discourses of transnationalism and post-identity, affect studies and ecocriticism.