Biko is an Associate Professor of Government & Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall College and co-founder of Research|Action, a worker owned research and organizing firm. They are working on an ethnographic book project that follows the 2020 Trump reelection campaign from his perspective as a volunteer, and is the author of Worker Centered (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Be Stone is Assistant Professor of Politics and Law, teaching courses in American politics, public policy, and qualitative-interpretive research methods. Dr. Stone received their Ph.D. in Political Science from The City University of New York in 2023. Their dissertation received the 2024 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association Caucus for Critical Political Science. Dr. Stone’s research examines the intersection of public policymaking and political culture from a feminist and critical race perspective.

Robin L. Turner is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the African and Black Studies Minor at Butler University in the US A and an honorary research associate of the Society, Work, and Politics Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Co-founder of Black Women Writing African Politics and Women of Color in Comparative Politics, Dr. Turner also served as Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program from 2019-2025 and as the founding director of the Social Justice and Diversity Butler University Core Curriculum requirement from 2017 to 2019. She earned a master’s degree and doctorate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley and a masters degree in social science (African politics) from the University of Cape Town (South Africa). Her research, writing, and teaching span multiple fields, including political science, gender studies, African studies, development studies, tourism studies, political ecology, and geography.

Dr. Turner’s research focuses principally on how public policies shape rural political economies, influence identities, and affect people’s behavior in southern Africa. She uses interviews, ethnography, and archival research to examine the interplay between state policies and local practices over time and to look closely at how past and present ways of structuring property and authority shape local political economies and influence constructions of identity. She has published on topics ranging from the politics of tradition; dispossession, property, and nature tourism; and field research to decolonial pedagogy in journals including Africa Spectrum, Development and Change, Journal of Modern African Studies, Peacebuilding, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research.

Dr. Turner teaches courses that help students better understand the perspectives, experiences, and political strategies of historically marginalized people in Africa, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. Her courses contribute to the political science major and minor, to the core curriculum, and to several interdisciplinary programs She led the the development of a new Global and Historical Studies course centered on the question, “What is Freedom,” with grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities,

Dr. Mneesha Gellman is associate professor of political science in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Her research spans human rights and democratization in Latin America and globally. She is the author of many books, including the forthcoming (Nov. 2025) Learning to Survive: Yurok Well-being in School, undertaken collaboratively with the Yurok Tribe of California; Misrepresentation and Silence in United States History Textbooks: The Politics of Historical Oblivion; Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States; and Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador. Dr. Gellman has written specifically on collaborative methodology with vulnerable communities in multiple outlets including PS: Political Science and Politics, QMMR, and in Doing Good Qualitative Research (Oxford University Press).

The founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which brings a Bachelor’s degree pathway to incarcerated students in Massachusetts, Dr. Gellman is also the editor of Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach College in Prison, and co-editor of Unlocking Learning: International Perspectives on Education in Prison. Dr. Gellman is past President of the Human Rights section of the American Political Science Association, and serves as an expert witness on country conditions in Mexico and El Salvador in asylum proceedings in US immigration courts.

Erica E. Townsend-Bell, PhD, is Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center for African Studies at Oklahoma State University. She earned her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. Her areas of expertise include the politics of intersectionality, comparative race and gender politics, and social movements, especially across the Americas. Her work is published in Political Research Quarterly, Signs, European Journal of Politics and Gender, JILAR, and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (LACES), among other outlets. Dr. Townsend-Bell is an active member of national and international academic associations and also serves on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review, and as a member of the American Political Science Association Council.

Nicholas Rush Smith is Reader in Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of Lonson. He is also a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. Previously, Smith was on the faculty of the City University of New York - City College and the Graduate Center.

Smith’s research utilizes qualitative methods to examine how democratic states use violence to produce order and why citizens sometimes use violence to challenge that order.

Based on approximately twenty months of ethnographic and archival research, Smith’s first book, Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019), explored these themes through the lens of crime, policing, and vigilantism in South Africa. The book won the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association, was co-winner of the Best Book Award from the African Politics Group of the American Political Science Association, and was named an Honorable Mention for the Charles Taylor Book Award of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Related Group of the American Political Science Association.

With Erica S. Simmons, Smith has also written about the intersection of comparative and ethnographic methods, co-editing Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), among other publications. For their work, Simmons and Smith were jointly awarded the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section of the American Political Science Association.

Smith’s work has also been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, among other outlets. He has won fellowship or grant support from Fulbright Hays, the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations. He has also held visiting researcher or fellowship positions at the Australian National University and the University of KwaZuluNatal and is a regular instructor in the Institute for Qualitative and Multimethod Research at Syracuse University. He was the inaugural recipient of CCNY’s Colin Powell School Faculty Teaching Award.

Currently, Smith is working on three book projects. The first examines the politics of police violence in democratic states, focusing on South Africa. The second explores the practice of “shadow work,” like ethnography and espionage, through a family history. The final project, with Erica S. Simmons, reconsiders the goal of generalization in political research.
Smith received his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

Young-Im Lee teaches Gender Politics and East Asian politics. Her research primarily focuses on the effectiveness of gender quotas in elections and gender and presidential elections in South Korea and Taiwan. She has designed and facilitated focus groups in South Korea and conducted over 100 interviews in both South Korea and Taiwan.

Dr. Sarah E. Parkinson is the Aronson Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines organizational behavior and social change in war- and disaster-affected settings, with a focus on Southwest Asia and North Africa. Parkinson has published award-winning research on militant organizations’ decision-making and internal dynamics, political violence, forced migrants’ access to healthcare, humanitarian aid, ethics, and research methods. Most recently, she has been conducting multi-sited research on disaster preparedness/response and public safety. Dr. Parkinson’s scholarship has involved extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, Iraq, and Qatar, as well as shorter engagements in Tunisia, Turkey, and the UAE.

Dr. Parkinson’s book, Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2022) won the 2023 Routledge Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence and received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Best Book on Middle East and North Africa Politics from the American Political Science Association’s Middle East and North Africa Politics Organized Section. Her scholarship has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine, Comparative Political Studies, and Comparative Politics in addition to outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Monkey Cage, and Good Authority. She has provided media commentary to outlets such as the Washington Post, BBC, Sky News, Bloomberg News, USA Today, ABC News, and Vox, among others.

Dr. Parkinson is a co-founder of the Advancing Research on Conflict (ARC) Consortium and sits on the advisory board of the Project on Middle East Political Science. She received her PhD and MA in political science from the University of Chicago and has held fellowships at Yale University, George Washington University, the University of Minnesota, and Northwestern University in Qatar. Parkinson speaks Arabic and French and is an active first responder in her free time.

Robert E. Kirsch is an interdisciplinary political theorist who researches extreme organizational change. Published research in this area includes macro-level issues such as "doomsday prepping" movements in the United States, energy production, climate change denialism, and heterodox political economies of public finance. It also encompasses smaller-scale questions of building a more equitable faculty in geoscience departments and the uses and abuses of leadership development in navigating organizational change. Kirsch pulls from both "Frankfurt School" critical theory and critical institutionalism (e.g. Veblen and Mumford) for these research questions of confronting crisis.

He is an associate editor of the journal New Political Science, co-chair of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, and spent AY 2022-2023 at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Universität Heidelberg.

Dr Ashlee Christoffersen (she/her) is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Politics at York University, and an Associate of its Centre for Feminist Research. Her research is concerned with the operationalisation of the Black feminist theory of intersectionality in equality policy and practice: its influence and possibilities, as well as the discursive and material resistance it faces. She is currently Co-Principal Investigator (together with Orly Siow) of a major project investigating race, gender and relationships between civil society and the state in three countries, funded by the Swedish Research Council. She is the author of The Politics of Intersectional Practice: Representation, Coalition and Solidarity in UK NGOs (Bristol University Press) and her work has been published widely in leading journals, including Politics & Gender, European Journal of Politics & Gender, Policy & Politics, West European Politics, and Social Politics. She holds a multi-award-winning PhD in Social Policy (University of Edinburgh) and an MA in Gender Studies (SOAS, University of London), and also consults internationally on intersectionality for clients including the International Institute for Sustainable Development and Climate-KIC.

Dara Strolovitch is Professor of women’s gender, and sexuality studies, American studies, and political science at Yale, where her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

She is the author of Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics, which examined how social and economic justice organizations advocate on behalf of intersectionally-marginalized groups. Affirmative Advocacy received the APSA’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy, the Leon Epstein Award for the best book on political organizations and parties, the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, and ARNOVA’s Virginia Hodgkinson Prize.

Strolovitch’s second book, When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America, won the 2024 award for the best book on race, ethnicity, and politics from APSA’s Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section and a Choice Award for outstanding academic title. The book examines the relationship between episodic hard times and the kinds of quotidian hard times that structure the lived experiences of marginalized groups by unpacking the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis, in part by exploring the raced and gendered politics of credit, subprime lending, and housing foreclosures.

Her work also appears in several edited volumes and journals, and has been supported by sources including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Brookings Institution, and the World Health Organization. She received the 2018 Outstanding Career Award from the Midwest Political Science Association Women’s Caucus and is co-recipient of the National Women’s Caucus for Political Science’s Mansbridge Award, given “to extraordinary individuals who perform service above and beyond the call of duty…to advance opportunities for women.” She was founding associate editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and served as co-editor of the American Political Science Review (2020-2024). With Allison Harris, she serves as co-director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Yale’s Institution for Social & Policy Studies.

Denise Walsh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. She conducts cross-regional comparative analyses to investigate how liberal democracies can become more inclusive and just. ​She is currently working on a book titled Misogyny in Power: Strategic Governance in Age of Crisis. Her forthcoming book, Imperial Sexism: Why Culture and Women’s Rights Don’t Clash (Oxford University Press, October 2025), compares policy debates about the face veil ban in France, polygyny in South Africa, and Indigenous women’s Indian status in Canada. She argues that a clash between culture and women's rights is never inescapable, discusses what fuels the widely held perception that the two clash, and explains how justice can be advanced for minoritized women and their communities. Walsh's first book, Women’s Rights in Democratizing States (Cambridge University Press, 2010), compares South Africa, Poland, and Chile to argue that when debate is more open and inclusive in institutions such as unions and political parties, women’s rights advance. Walsh is a former editor of the American Political Science Review and has been active in diversifying the profession. Her research has been funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies at Notre Dame, the National Science Foundation, USAID, the Institute for Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Italy, the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, and many organizations at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Sarah Marie Wiebe grew up on unceded Coast Salish territory in British Columbia, BC and she is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Administration and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. With a research focus on community development and environmental sustainability, she is a co-founder of the FERN (Feminist Environmental Research Network) Collaborative and has published in journals including Critical Policy Studies, New Political Science, Politics & Policy and Studies in Social Justice. Her book Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada's Chemical Valley (2016) with UBC Press won the Charles Taylor Book Award (2017) and examined policy responses to the impact of pollution on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation's environmental health. Dr. Wiebe is also the author of Life against States of Emergency: Revitalizing Treaty Relations from Attawapiskat (2023) with UBC Press, which received the 2024 Donald Smiley Book Award from the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). She also received the CPSA Teaching Prize in 2025. Her third book Hot Mess: Mothering through a Code Red Climate Emergency was published by Fernwood Press in 2024.

Care, collaboration and community are core principles and practices and animate Dr. Wiebe’s approach to teaching and scholarship. Alongside Dr. Jennifer Lawrence (Virginia Tech), she is the co-editor of Biopolitical Disaster and along with Dr. Leah Levac (Guelph), the co-editor of Creating Spaces of Engagement: Policy Justice and the Practical Craft of Deliberative Democracy. At the intersections of environmental justice and citizen engagement, her teaching and research interests emphasize political ecology, policy justice and deliberative dialogue. As a collaborative researcher and filmmaker, she worked with Indigenous communities on sustainability-themed films including To Fish as Formerly, and mixed media storytelling through the Reimagining Attawapiskat project and the Seascape Indigenous Storytelling Studio. Current research focuses on governance through the aftermath of climate disasters, emergency management from an equity lens and co-designing policy from a Climate CARE approach (Community Actions and Responses to Extreme weather events).

Ethel Tungohan is the Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts and Activism, and Associate Professor of Politics at York University. Her research looks at migrant labor, specifically assessing migrant activism. She has recently published "Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Communities of Care and Movement Building," which was the recipient of the National Women's Studies Association First Book Prize. She considers herself a scholar-activist and partners closely with migrant justice organizations in her work and advocacy.

Dr. Sarah Surak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Salisbury University. Her interdisciplinary research spans the topics of democratic engagement, environmental political theory, social theory, civic engagement, discard studies, and critical public administration, and has appeared in journals such as Policy Studies, New Political Science, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Administrative Theory & Praxis, and the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement.

Surak participated as a Fellow in the 2021-2022 Transatlantic Exchange of Civic Educators (TECE). TECE brought together US-American and German civic education and engagement professionals active in non-formal, youth work, and out-of-school time capacities. She works extensively in Germany, coordinating workshops on topics of democratic civic engagement and American government.

From 2015 - 2020 Dr. Surak co-Directed Salisbury University’s Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement (PACE). Surak and Pope are the 2018 recipients of the Wilson H. Elkins Professorship from the University System of Maryland to support these efforts. Surak currently serves as a Senior Fellow for PACE, working with the national Center for Civic Reflection hosted by Salisbury University.

Nadia E. Brown (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is a Professor of Government, chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and affiliate in the African American Studies program at Georgetown University. She specializes in Black women’s politics and holds a graduate certificate in Women's and Gender Studies. Dr. Brown's research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women's studies. While trained as a political scientist, her scholarship on intersectionality seeks to push beyond disciplinary constraints to think more holistically about the politics of identity.

She is the author or editor of several award winning books – including Sisters in the Statehouse: Black Women and Legislative Decision Making (Oxford University Press); Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites (with Danielle Lemi); Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics (with Sarah Allen Gershon, Routledge Press); The Politics of Protest: Readings on the Black Lives Matter Movement (with Ray Block, Jr. and Christopher Stout, Routledge Press); Approaching Democracy: American Government in Times of Challenge (with Larry Berman, Bruce Allen Murphy and Sarah Allen Gershon, Routledge Press). Professor Brown is the lead editor of Politics, Groups and Identities. Professor Brown is part of the #MeTooPoliSci Collective where she spearheads efforts to stop sexual harassment in the discipline. Along with co-PIs Rebecca Gill (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) Stella Rouse (University of Maryland, College Park), Elizabeth Sharrow (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) she is the recipient of a million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation for their project titled "#MeTooPoliSci Leveraging A Professional Association to Address Sexual Harassment in Political Science." Lastly, Professor Brown is an editor with The Monkey Cage, a political science blog in the Washington Post.

Michelle Weitzel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. Prior to joining the Institute, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Basel (2020-2022). She received her PhD from The New School in 2020, where she trained in comparative politics and international relations and specialized in the political systems of the Middle East and North Africa. Weitzel’s research centers on repression, violence, conflict, critical security studies, spatial and sensory politics, affect and emotions. Her current book project, entitled “Sound Politics: Affective Governance and the State,” draws on case studies in Palestine, Israel, Algeria, France, and Morocco.

Kimala Price is Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Co-Director of the Bread and Roses Center for Feminist Research and Activism at San Diego State University. Her research focuses on reproductive health policy and politics, women of color and the reproductive justice movement, queering reproductive justice, coalition-building and political intersectionality, anti-abortion campaigns targeting African American communities, interpretive research methods and methodology (esp. discourse, narrative, and visual analysis), and community-engaged research. She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Reclaiming the Black Reproductive Body, that examines how African American communities have organized for reproductive justice in the U.S. She is the author of Reproductive Politics in the United States (Routledge 2021). Her research has also been published in journals such as Politics & Gender; Politics, Groups, and Identities; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Women’s Health Issues; American Studies; Sexuality Research and Social Policy; and Contexts, and in edited volumes such as Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip Hop Feminist Anthology and LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader. She has also written commentary for the Washington Post and the Conversation. She served on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest (serving San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial Counties) for many years. She has a PhD in political science and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.