Terressa A. Benz
currently lives in Detroit, Michigan and is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Oakland University. She is a critical criminologist whose work lies at the intersection of law and society, urban sociology, and criminology. Dr. Benz has written about poverty fetishism, environmental racism, campus carry, and the socio-legal exclusion of undesirable populations in the postindustrial city.
Graham Cassano
is an Associate Professor of sociology at Oakland University. His most recent books include A New Kind of Public: Community, Solidarity, Political Economy in New Deal Cinema, 1935-48 and Eleanor Smith’s Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams’s Chicago.
Daniel Clark
teaches history at Oakland University, in Rochester, Michigan. He is the author of Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town (University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom (University of Illinois Press, 2018).
Jon W. Carroll
is an anthropological archaeologist with research interests in cultural transmission, social interaction and integration, political and economic organization, and the social science applications of Geographic Information Systems (gis). Dr. Carroll is a Registered Professional Archaeologist (rpa) who specializes in the archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands of North America and is an faa-licensed drone pilot. His latest research conducted in Africa, Europe, North America and the Near East uses aerial drones to collect multispectral aerial imagery for anthropological and archaeological computer modeling and simulation.
Katrinell Davis
is an Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Florida State University, where she teaches courses exploring race and gender relations, poverty and policy, as well as work and mobility trends within the American labor market. Dr. Davis is a stratification sociologist who specializes in race and class inequalities in urban areas, especially as they manifest within the workplace, schools, and within communities. Her recent work explores the
limits to community organizing for improved essential services in low resource communities. Michael D. Doan
is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University and a community-based activist in Detroit. He has worked with Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management (d-rem) and the Detroit Independent Freedom Schools Movement (difs) and is currently a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. He is the author of “Resisting Structural Epistemic Injustice,” Feminist Philosophical Quarterly (2018), and the co-author (with Shea Howell and Ami Harbin) of “Detroit to Flint and Back Again: Solidarity Forever,” Critical Sociology (2017).
David Fasenfest
is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Affairs, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Wayne State University, the editor of Critical Sociology and edits the book series Studies in Critical Social Science and New Scholarship in Political Economy, both with Brill Academic Press. His research focuses on inequality, urban development and Marxism. He is the author of “Emergency Management in Michigan: A Misguided Policy Initiative” (2018) in Ashley Nickels and Jason Rivera (eds.) Community Development and Public Administration Theory: Empowerment through the Enhancement of Democratic Principles, London: Routledge; “A Neoliberal Response to an Urban Crisis: Emergency Management in Flint, mi” (2018) Critical Sociology; “Monsieur Le Capital and Madame La Terre on the Brink” (2017) in Molly Scott Cato and Peter North (eds.) Towards Just and Sustainable Economies: Comparing Social and Solidarity Economy in the North and South. Bristol: Policy Press; “The Cooperative City: Building Economic Democracy” (2015), in Michael Peter Smith and Lucas Owen Kirkpatrick (eds.), Reinventing Detroit, Volume 11, Comparative Urban and Community Research, Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books. In addition, he is the editor of Engaging Social Justice: Critical Studies of 21st Century Social Transformation (Haymarket, 2010), and Social Change, Resistance and Social Practice (Haymarket, 2011).
A.E. Garrison
is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in Youth Studies at Central Michigan University. She earned her doctorate in Rural Sociology from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2011, with an emphasis in community development and educational policy and analysis. The focus of her work has been the development of graphic sociological methodology for use in scholarship and pedagogy.
Previous scholarly work includes “Boneyards of the Sortatropolis Exploring a City of Industrial Secrets-Lansing, Michigan (Part 1)” (Garrison 2017). Dr. Garrison’s graphic work includes “Ghosts of Infertility: haunted by realities of reproductive death” (Garrison, 2016), and “Boneyard Quiet: a ghost story” (Garrison, 2020). Dr. Garrison’s research interests also include social consequences that result from state resource management policies and practices, especially impacting urban infrastructure in Rust Belt cities of the United States, and rural communities.
Peter J. Hammer
was named the A. Alfred Taubman Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School in fall 2018. Hammer is the director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne Law. The Keith Center is dedicated to promoting the educational, economic and political empowerment of under-represented communities in urban areas and to ensuring that the phrase “equal justice under law” applies to all members of society. Hammer has become a leading voice on the economic and social issues impacting the city of Detroit.
Ami Harbin
is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies at Oakland University. Her research is in the area of feminist philosophy, moral psychology, and bioethics. She is the author of Disorientation and Moral Life (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Shea Howell
is a community-based organizer in Detroit. She is a writer and speaker, working closely with the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. She is a cofounder of Detroit Summer and works extensively in areas of community power, democratic processes, and transformative relationships. She is a member of the Riverwise Magazine Collective and Detroit Independent Freedom Schools. She is a professor of communication at Oakland University.
Jacob Lederman
is Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of Michigan-Flint. His research examines the relationship between urban governance and expertise.
Raoul S. Liévanos
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon. His research focuses primarily on the organizational, institutional,
demographic, and spatial dynamics of environmental and housing market inequalities and on the social movements and policy processes that attempt to address such inequalities in the United States. Benjamin J. Pauli
holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University and is an Assistant Professor of Social Science at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. His research interests include political ideologies, social movements, environmental justice, water, and the interface between scientists and the public. He has been involved in the response to the Flint water crisis as a resident, activist, researcher, and a member of a multi-university scientific team. His Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis (mit Press 2019) takes an ethnographic look at local water activism. Dr. Pauli is President of the Board of Directors of the Environmental Transformation Movement of Flint (etmflint.org), which seeks to educate and advocate around environmental justice issues and help develop the next generation of environmental justice leaders. He also serves as a representative of the academic community on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
Julie Sze
is Professor and the Founding Chair of American Studies at the University of California at Davis. She has published three books (most recently, Environmental Justice in Moment of Danger in 2020), edited a collection on Sustainability and Social Justice (2018), and over 50 articles and book chapters. Her research is on environmental inequalities, the relationship between social movements and policy implementation and in the areas of public and environmental humanities.