EDITORIAL BOARD
Naomi Adiv
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Naomi Adiv is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto Missisauga, in Canada. She is interested in urban public spaces, contested meanings of community, and the purposes and practices of community-based arts. Her recent publications include “Hardening Racial Lines in Public Space” (July 2015) for Metropolitics and “On being groped and staying quiet. Or, what kind of place an airplane can be” in Gender, Place and Culture (spring 2017).
Joshua Akers​
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Joshua Akers is an assistant professor of geography and urban and regional studies at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. His research and writing examines the intersection of markets and policy and their material impacts on urban neighborhoods and everyday life. He is the founder and director of the Urban Praxis Workshop, a community-led research initiative that collaborates with organizations and activists in Detroit focused on housing and tenancy issues. Part of this work is found at www.propertypraxis.org.
Jean Beaman​
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Jean Beaman is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was previously on the faculty at Purdue University and has held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state-sponsored violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North-African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and chapters. She is also an editor of H-Net Black Europe and an associate editor of the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
Hilary Botein​
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Hilary Botein is an associate professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), and the editorial director of Metropolitics. Her research explores the social politics of policies and programs underlying affordable housing and community development. She also is interested in how housing programs can meet the needs of vulnerable populations—and in how they fail. She has published in journals including Housing Policy Debate, Urban Affairs Review, and the Journal of Urban History.
James DeFilippis​
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James DeFilippis is an Associate Professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His research focuses on the politics and economics of cities and communities. He is particularly interested in the processes of social change, and questions of power and justice in cities. His work strives to make connections, linking disciplines and connecting academic theory and grounded political practice. He has published work in academic journals in a variety of fields. He is the author or editor of six books, including the award-winning Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital (New York/London: Routledge, 2004) and Urban Policy in the Time of Obama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Professor DeFilippis has also written applied monographs and reports, and his interests extend well beyond the academy and into the practice of concrete political work and policy analyses.
Maura McGee​
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Maura McGee is a PhD candidate in the sociology program at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Her research examines the intersection of immigration, race, and gentrification in Brooklyn and Paris. She is the editorial assistant at Metropolitics.
Laura Wolf-Powers​
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Laura Wolf-Powers is an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). She is an academic advisor to the Pratt Center for Community Development on a project advocating public value recovery as part of the NYC Department of City Planning’s Gowanus neighborhood rezoning in Brooklyn.
WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS
Thalles Vichiato Breda
Thalles Breda graduated in Social Sciences at UFSCar (Brazil), with an emphasis on Sociology and Political Science. He holds a master in Sociology by the Department of Postgraduate Studies in Sociology, UFSCar. He has experience in Sociology, with an emphasis on Urban Sociology, Urban Space Production, Social Management and Social Housing. He was a Visiting Researcher at the Technical University of Berlin (Germany) in 2019, and is currently a PhD student in Sociology by the Post-Graduate Department in Sociology/UFSCar (Brazil) and a PhD student by the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism by Bauhaus University of Weimar (Germany) - under cotutelle regime; researcher of the Sagemm Research Group: Social Activities, Gender, Markets and Mobilities from below (Latin America) and Áskesis managing editor - journal of the post-graduation students in Sociology at UFSCar.
Ana Cukovic
Ana is a PhD student affiliated with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University. Her research focuses on migration and urban redevelopment in Detroit and examines migration as instrumental to capital accumulation at different times and geographies, and through various mechanisms. Currently, she is the coordinator for the Seminar Series on Forced Migration and Europe-Asia Research Platform launched by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG).
Sibonelo Gumede
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Sibonelo Gumede is an urbanist and researcher based in South Africa who is interested in the intersection of city-making processes and citizenship in post-colonial urban environments. Gumede works across multidisciplinary projects with communities, policymakers, built environment practitioners and artists. He is a 2021 Research fellow at the Centre for Arts, Design and Social Research and he is currently investigating the spatial manifestations of one of the oldest residential suburbs in Durban, the Berea - a space that holds social and political tensions of order and re-organisation. He has served as a Vice President and in the educational committee of the Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Arts (KZNSA). He has also been a part of the Urban Futures Centre, an urban research laboratory which is based at the Durban University of Technology. Gumede currently holds a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the University of Kwa-Zulu and is currently pursuing a MPhil in Southern Urbanism at the University of Cape Town.
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Toby Irving
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Toby Rae Irving is a PhD student in political science at the CUNY Graduate Center. A native New Yorker, she is concerned with democracy in the policy process, especially as it relates to anti-poverty policy and urban development in New York City. Working with qualitative methods, her research focuses on the effects of public policy and government structures on political imagination and urban space. Toby has worked and organized in a number of different justice-oriented areas, from youth development to employment law to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College in Comparative American Studies, Dance, and History.
Miriam Muthoni Maina
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Miriam is an urban researcher, GIS and spatial analytics enthusiast and a post-doctoral researcher. She is currently based at the NRF Chair in Spatial Analysis & City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. She holds a Doctorate and Masters in Town and Regional Planning from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and a BA in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
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Her research, academic and professional interests are on urban planning and policy making, using spatial data and intelligence for planning, driving investment, and creating more equitable urban spaces; and the spatial and economic development of African towns and cities. Her research focuses on the use of social and geospatial data and analytics to document and analyze urban growth and development in support of policy making. She has also worked at the Centre for Affordable Housing in Africa (CAHF), as a Research Manager, and a GIS and Spatial Analytics Consultant, and at the Centre for Urban Innovations at the University of Nairobi as a project manager.
Svetlana Moskaleva​
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Svetlana Moskaleva is a PhD student in the department of Sociology at the European University at St.Petersburg.
Sezen Savran Penbecioglu​
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Received her B.Sc. degree from the Department of City and Regional Planning at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul. Following her graduation, she pursued her master’s degree and Ph.D at Gazi University, Ankara. Currently, She is a member of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Fine Arts at Osmaniye Korkut Ata University. Her research interests are urban sociology, housing, urban poverty and geographies of migration.
Ashish Prabhakar​
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Ashish is a Doctoral Scholar with the Centre for Regional Studies, School of Social Sciences at the University of Hyderabad. He is currently working towards his doctoral thesis which examines the spatial constructions of social conflicts around solid waste management in Peri-Urban India, focusing on the case of Vilappilsala, Kerala.
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His interests include Urban theory and practice, Critical Development studies, Political Ecology, Human geography and Environmental policy.
Norma Schemschat​
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Norma Schemschat is a PhD candidate at the department of geography at Ecole normale supérieure (Ulm) in Paris and a member of the RE-CITY (Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie) network.
She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Hamburg in Germany, where she used discourse analysis to study topics such as racism in the societal center and climate-induced migration. For her PhD, she studies the arrival of forced migrants in “shrinking cities” and the negotiations of place and belonging that come along with it, in order to learn more about the challenges to and opportunities of refugee-centered revitalization of shrinking cities.
Chris Chih-Hua Tseng​
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Chris Chih-Hua Tseng is a Ph.D. student from the Department of Sociology, UC Irvine (start from fall 2021). He held an M.A. in sociology from the National Taiwan University. His research focuses on politics, development, and housing inequality, especially under the East Asian context.
Hilary Wilson​
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Hilary's research broadly examines the history of economic development policy in U.S. cities and the role of urban governance in (re)producing socio-spatial inequalities along the lines of race, gender, and class. In light of recent theorizations of financialization and its impacts on older industrial cities, her dissertation research traces the material and discursive dimensions of debt-financed redevelopment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing on archival research and interviews with key players in Milwaukee’s redevelopment politics, she interrogates how ideologies of race and gender, as well as alternative visions of economic development, have shaped the city’s fiscal policy since the 1970s.
Before pursuing her PhD, she worked and volunteered in various capacities in Milwaukee, and was a founding board member of the Milwaukee Community Land Trust, the city’s first land trust devoted to providing permanently affordable housing for low-income Milwaukee residents. She holds an undergraduate degree in Spanish and Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA.