Sanford Schram is on the faculty in the Political Science Department at Hunter College, CUNY and in the Sociology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center where he teaches in the doctoral program in Political Science. He is also active as a Faculty Associate at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute (which is part of Hunter College). Schram has written a number of books. Two of his books, the solely authored Words of Welfare (Minnesota, 1995) and Disciplining the Poor (Chicago, 2011)--co-authored with Joe Soss and Richard Fording--both received the American Political Science Association’s Michael Harrington Award for books dedicated to promoting social change. Disciplining the Poor has also received multiple other awards including in 2012 the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award from the American Sociological Association for the best book for combating racism. In 2012, Schram received the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the Caucus for a New Political Science. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and other academic journals, as well as The Washington Post and other mass media publications. Schram’s most recent book, co-authored with Richard Fording, is entitled Hard White: The Mainstreaming of Racism in American Politics (Oxford, 2020).

Cristina Beltrán, Ph.D., works at the intersection of Latinx politics and political theory. She is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. From 2001 until 2011, she taught in the Political Science Department at Haverford College; in 2013–14, she was a resident member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and an advanced seminar member at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2019.

Her work has appeared in Political Theory, the Du Bois Review, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Political Research Quarterly, and various edited volumes. She is currently the co-editor of Theory & Event, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes work by scholars working at the intersections of political theory, cultural theory, political economy, aesthetics, philosophy, and the arts. She is also an occasional guest on MSNBC.

Her new book, Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press), explores the American right’s deep antipathy toward nonwhite migrants from Mexico and Latin America and examines why many in the Republican Party experience acts of cruelty against migrants as a form of democratic pleasure. Other book projects include The Right Kind of Difference: Aesthetics, Affect, and the Ideological Uncertainty of Race, a collection of essays that explores a variety of topics including Latino conservatism, and what it means to work ethically at the intersection of race and political theory.

Cristina and her husband, editor and writer Matthew Budman, live in New York City.

Nadia E. Brown (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is a University Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue 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); 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. In July 2021, Dr Brown will be a Full Professor of Government and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University. 

 Professor Brown lives outside of Indianapolis with her husband, three young daughters, her mother and their dog, Ziggy. 

Jeffrey C. Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. Editor in Chief of Perspectives on Politics, a flagship journal of the American Political Science Association, from 2009-2017. Author of #AgainstTrump: Notes from Year One (2018), Professor Isaac has published in a range of public intellectual venues, including Public Seminar, Common Dreams, Dissent, the Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Guardian.

Daniel Tourinho Peres teaches undergraduate and graduates courses on Political Philosophy at the Philosophy Department, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). He is also a member of the Centre of Studies in Humanities (CRH-UFBA) and a research fellow at the Brazilian National Council of Scientific Research (CNPq). He works mostly on modern political thought.

Paulo Fábio Dantas Neto is Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science of the Philosophy and Human Science School at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), teacher of the Post-Graduation Program of Social Sciences (PPGCS/UFBA) and a researcher at the Center of Studies and Research on Humanities (CRH/FFCH/UFBA). Leads the research group “Ecos do Subsolo” (Echoes from Underground) on the thematic area of Brazilian Political Thought. He has prior trajectory of research on elite and political parties with emphasis on Brazilian and Bahian politics. He was a councilman in Salvador (1983-1988), state deputy in Bahia (1989) and Secretary of Education in Salvador (1994).

Leo Casey is the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers which focuses of issues of public education, unionism and democracy promotion. Before he assumed his current position at the Institute, Casey served as Vice President from Academic High Schools for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), New York City’s 200,000 person strong teacher union. He is the son of two New York City public school teachers. Casey attended Antioch College in Ohio, the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania and the University of Toronto in Canada, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy.

After a stint in political organizing, Casey began his teaching career in 1984 at Clara Barton High School in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. There he taught classes in Civics, American History, African-American Studies, Ethical Issues in Medicine and Political Science for fifteen years. For ten years in a row, his classes – entirely students of color, largely immigrant and largely female – won the New York City championship of the national We the People civics competition, winning the New York State championship four times and placing fourth in the nation twice. He was recognized in the Congressional Record for the achievements of his classes in the competition.

Casey’s union activism at Clara Barton began in 1987, when he led an effort to have the school building closed to clean up major asbestos contamination caused by the Department of Education’s renovations. He served as UFT Chapter Leader at Clara Barton for ten years. He has a long history of union involvement, including work as a United Farm Worker’s organizer and participation in the first unionization drive of graduate teaching assistants in Canada.

In 1999, Casey became a full-time UFT Special Representative for High Schools. He was elected Vice President from Academic High Schools in October 2007. As UFT Vice President he taught a class in Global Studies every day at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan.

Casey has served as Vice President of the Graduate Student Union at the University of Toronto and on the executive of the Ontario Federation of Students. He was editor in chief of the Antioch Record, and founding National Field Director of Democratic Socialists of America. He was a fellow of the Teachers’ Network Leadership Institute. He served as the New York State Teacher Reviewer for the National Standards for Civics and Government Project. He currently serves as a member of the editorial board of Dissent Magazine.

Casey has won several awards for his teaching and was named national Social Studies Teacher of the Year for the American Teacher Awards in 1992. Casey led the design team for the UFT’s Secondary Charter School, and led the UFT’s work with charter schools, including charter organizing, while he served as UFT Vice President. He has worked with teacher unions and teachers in Russia, Tanzania and China on the development of civics education.

Casey has written extensively on civics, education, unionism and politics, and is the author of Teacher Insurgency: A Strategic and Organizing Perspective (Harvard Education Press, 2020.)

Alessandro Pinzani is professor for ethics and political philosophy at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis (Brazil) and since 2006 he is a fellow researcher of CNPq (Brazilian Research Council). He writes on Critical Theory, social philosophy, poverty, and democracy. He got his PhD and Habilitation in Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Dresden (2013), Bochum (2016 and 2020) and Graz (2019) as well as at the Czech Academy of Sciences (2019), and a visiting scholar at Columbia University, NY (2001/02), at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2010) and at the University of Florence (2015/16). Among his books: Jürgen Habermas (München: Beck, 2007), An den Wurzeln moderner Demokratie (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), Money, Autonomy, and Citizenship with W. Leão Rego, Dordrecht: Springer, 2018).