Hector Agredano
BA, University of California, Santa Cruz (Honors); MPhil, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York; Advanced Certificate in GISc, Lehman College, New York

Research Interests: Mexico; Latin America; marxism; revolutions; Historical GIS; Transportation

Advisor: Juliana Maantay

Dissertation Research: “Rails to Revolution: Railroads, Railroad Workers and the Geographies of the Mexican Revolution"

Hector Agredano received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Sociolo
gy (Honors) in 2008 and received an MPhil from the Graduate Center, CUNY and an Advanced Certificate in GISc from Lehman College in 2015.

He is currently doing archival research in Mexico where he is collecting data for his dissertation that explores the role of railroads and railroad workers in the Mexican Revolution from 1910-1914. Through this research he explores the relationships between social movements and transportation infrastructures.

Publications

• Mexico City Metro in Selima Sultana and Joe Weber, eds. Minicars, Maglevs, and Mopeds: Modern Modes of Transportation Around the World. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Press. 2016.

Fellowships & Awards

• The Neil Smith Travel and Research Award

• National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research: Railroads, 

• Railroad Workers, and Geographies of Social Change (#1459108)

• Advanced Research Collaborative Knickerbocker Award for Archival Research in American Studies

• Conference of Latinamericanist Geographers Field Study Award. 

• Doctoral Student Research Grant

• Conference Presentation Support

• Dean K. Harrison Fellowship

Ekaterina Bezborodko
MA, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Research Interests: Education provision; geography education; neoliberal restructuring; informal and alternative economies; institutional economics.

Advisor: Marianna Pavlovskaya 

Katya received an MA in geography from Rutgers University, where she studied economies of blood banks and worked for the Rutgers Climate Institute as an administrator and research assistant. She teaches introductory and economic geography at Hunter College and has worked with Marianna Pavlovskaya on mapping the solidarity economy. Her interests include changing educational provision following neoliberal restructuring and the attendant changes in subjectivity, as well as geography education at both secondary and post-secondary levels.

Morgan L.C. Buck
Website
BA, Concordia University, Montreal

Research Interests: Racism and racial capitalism; landscape; domesticity; public housing and the welfare state; South Africa

Advisor: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Dissertation Research: “Domestic Landscapes: Public Housing and the Politics of Home in Johannesburg, 1930–1994”

My doctoral research investigates the gendered history of public housing in Johannesburg between 1930 and 1994. Drawing mainly on Black feminist and postcolonial theory, I attend specifically to how material and discursive struggles around family housing contributed to unsettling and re-articulating racialized constructions of women, family, and urban space. This research speaks to a broader academic and political interest in repositioning gender alongside race as central the production of cultural landscapes, and in foregrounding women’s histories and political subjectivities in the study of state formation. My current research interests, combined with my background in political economy and rural sociology, inform my teaching practice in the Urban Studies and Urban Affairs and Planning departments at Queens College and Hunter College.

Publications

• 2015, “What is Radical Materialism?” Social Text Online (March 2015).  

• 2013, Encyclopedia Entry “Smith, Neil” in Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology, R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms, eds. (with Malav Kanuga, Zoltan Gluck, Steven McFarland).

• 2013, “Policing the New Enclosures: On Violence, Primitive Accumulation, and Crisis in the Neoliberal Food Regime” in The Neoliberal Regime in the Agri-Food Sector: Crisis, Resilience and Restructuring, S. Wolf and A. Bonanno, eds.  

Fellowships & Awards

• SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2016–17

• ARC Award for Archival Research in African American and African Diaspora Studies, 2016

• Dissertation Research Travel Award, GC CUNY, Summer 2016

• ARC Award for Archival Research in African American and African Diaspora Studies, 2015

• Pre-Dissertation Travel Award, GC CUNY, Summer 2014

• SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, 2013

Erin Friedman
Website
MA, Hunter College, New York

Research Interests: Human-environment; landuse; GIS; remote sensing; climate change; adaptation; resilience; coastal hazards; Caribbean; decision-making; Anthropocene

Advisor: William Solecki

Erin Friedman received her MA in Geography from CUNY Hunter College focusing on the impacts of sea-level rise on Antigua's coastal economy and infrastructure. After completing her Master's , Erin provided cartographic and spatial analysis for the Nelson’s Dockyard UNESCO World Heritage Site Application in Antigua. Erin is currently a research assistant at the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities (CISC) where she works with the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN) group. Erin is interested in the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban and rural coastal landuse practices, and the data needs of stakeholders in these areas for climate mitigation. Currently, her research involves working with stakeholders in Caribbean small island states to understand their climate change adaptation strategies and needs for mitigation. 

Affiliations: CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities

Allison Guess

Academia.edu
BA, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA            

Research Interests: Land; migration; Black geographies; place; Black pessimistic-optimism; Black futurity; anti-blackness; racial capitalism; collective Black liberation 

Advisor: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Dissertation Research: Black land, Black relationships to land and place as it relates to (voluntary reverse) migration

Allison is origionally from Pittsburgh, PA. She earned a double major in Political Science and Hispanic Languages and Literature. Additionally, Allison is a consultant for an organization called The Black/Land Project in which she supports the "transcending historical trauma program" by contributing to practical applications of self-determination as it relates to community-based research and theoretical outputs. At the Graduate Center at CUNY, Allison is working under the direction of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Allison is looking at Black peoples' relationships to land and place in connection to voluntary reverse migration and the capitalist structure. 

Publications

• Guess, A. "(Un)bordered Emancipation of the Activist/Academic divide: A Different Type of Discipline." Critical Ethnic Studies Association Blog (2015)

• Tuck, Guess and Sultan. “Not Nowhere: Collaborating on Selfsame Land.” Decolonization Indigeneity, Education & Society (2014). 

• Tuck, Smith, Guess, Benjamin, and Jones. “Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations.” The inaugural issue of the new trajectory of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 5274.)

Fellowships & Awards: Research Fellow at The Futures Initiative, Graduate Center at CUNY

Affiliations: The Futures Initiative, The Black/Land Project

Hunter Jackson
BA, University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests: Race; borders and migration; the state; the US South; police and prisons.

Advisors: Rupal Oza and Monica Varsanyi

Dissertation Research: “In Certain Respects, the Future Looks Bright: Migration, Criminalization, and Race-Making in 21st Century Alabama”

I grew up in the South without knowing much about the places I came from. Currently I'm exploring ways the region's long histories of racialized terror and violence are influencing current struggles and conflicts around race, labor, and mobility in Alabama.

Kyeongsu Kim
MCRP, Rutgers University, New Jersey

Research Interests: Transport accessibility; travel behavior; spatial mismatch; environmental justice; residence choice; sustainable transport infrastructure investment

Advisor: Jonathan Peters

Dissertation Research: Multi-layored impacts of light rail transit

I specialize in transport and economic geography. My main research interest is to investigate sustainable low-cost transportation investments, which will not only mitigate spatial mismatch but secure transportation affordability. 

Catherine King
BS in Geophysics, University of California, Santa Barbara; MS in Geology, University of Montana

Research Interests: Ecosystem-based Fisheries Management; space of interaction between science and management; socio-ecological networks, global production networks, actor-networks

Advisor: Kenneth Gould

Dissertation Research: “Understanding Environmental Governance and the Emergence of Ecosystem-based Fisheries Management in the New England Groundfish Fishery”

My dissertation project analyzes the governance of the New England groundfish fishery through the emergence of Ecosystem-based Fisheries Management (EBFM), focusing on how science and management function together in a network of ecological, social, and economic relationships. Scientific uncertainty, rapidly changing environmental conditions, and variable market dynamics require participatory and adaptive management strategies that reconcile disciplinary and epistemological divisions. By closely examining practices of conceptualization, classification, and categorization, I hope to provide insights on contradictions that hinder understanding in areas where economic, social, and conservation agendas interact. My research integrates methods from political ecology and political economy to investigate the interrelated processes of a natural resource network. 

Caroline Loomis
Website
BA, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY

Research Interests: Critical childhood studies; educational geographies; race, racism and racial capitalism; resistance; gentrification; partition; social reproduction; agriculture and food justice

Advisor: Cindi Katz

Dissertation Research: Childhood, schooling, race and gentrification in NYC

Caroline came to doctoral study from over a decade in the fields of food justice and youth development, leading and designing educational programs in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. Her curiosity and commitments to the intersections of social justice, space/place and education led her to the Grad Center, where her research centers on childhood, schooling, race and gentrification in New York City.

Caroline also works as a freelance facilitator/trainer, and serves as an Instructional Technology Fellow with CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, where she supports faculty to develop creative pedagogical practices and meaningfully integrate digital technology into their courses. She loves being in gardens, classrooms, oceans, parks, and collaborative spaces.

Affiliations: American Studies Certificate Program

Amanda Matles
BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art

Research Interests: Politics of social reproduction; racial capitalism; youth; policing; gentrification; cities; globalization; economic restructuring; critical participatory action research; participatory video

Advisor: Cindi Katz

Dissertation Research: “Growing Up Policed: Young People’s Strategic Negotiations of Spatial Violence in New York City”

Amanda is geographer, artist, activist, and filmmaker. She uses participatory video methods to develop research about the everyday intersections of economic restructuring, law and social control in the lives of young people, and to document and analyze the complex making of human geographies. Amanda earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2004 and was a 2010 fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, NY. Amanda's most recent participatory video research project, Being Policed, was conducted with youth researchers from Make the Road New York in Bushwick, Brooklyn from 2013-2015. Together they produced a "call to action" video visualizing statistical data on the policing of youth, gathered as part of the project alongside interviews with youth leaders. The team also conducted numerous video interviews with young people about their everyday, embodied experiences of and visions for changes to Stop and Frisk policing and harsh Zero Tolerance policies. The project is archived online and has been used in classrooms, "know your rights trainings," and exhibitions. Amanda is committed to making compelling research contributions to public discourses through engagement with social movements for economic and social justice in her writing, teaching, and visual research.

Affiliations: Public Science Project

Rafael A. Mutis
http://fincadelpueblo.wordpress.com/
BA, University of Dallas; MA, University of Arizona, Tucson; MPH, University of Arizona, Tucson

Research Interests: The social construction of race, racism, gender and homophobia; women of color feminisms; undoing the gender binary; LGBTQ people of color analysis; ethnobotanies; war; trauma and healing; alternatives to development; ecological/onto-epistemologies; space, place & race; globalization; the production of nature; pre and post colonial analysis and cosmologies; autocthonous lives; people of color anarchisms, and communisms; the Global South.  

Advisor: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Dissertation Research: Indigenous Issues - Aboriginal and Afro Ethnobotanies in the midst of violent neoliberalismo in Cauca, Colombia 

Rafael A.Mutis Garcia is a fourth year Geography student at the CUNY Graduate Center.  After having studied herbalism, race, gender, sexuality, class issues in community organizing work and in the academy, Rafael is currently studying ethnobotany issues in Afro and other Indigenous communities in Colombia who are still under threat of displacement under neoliberalism and in the midst of peace negotiations.  Using a decolonial analysis and lens, Rafael is looking to understand how these ecological onto-epistemologies can provide a way out of disastrous development and increasingly destructive climate change toward sustainability.  .  

Affiliations: The Center for Place, Culture and Politics

Mert Peksen
gc-cuny.academia.edu/MertPeksen
MA, International Migration and Social Cohesion (MISOCO), University of Amsterdam

Research Interests: International migration; borders; border control regimes; forced migration; refugees; transit migration; territory and sovereignty; Middle East; Turkey; Turkish-Greek border.

Advisor: Monica Varsanyi

I completed my BA and MA in Political Science and International Relations in 2010 at the Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul. In 2012 I graduated from the European Joint Master’s Program in International Migration and Social Cohesion (MISOCO) with a joint MA degree from the University of Amsterdam, University of Osnabruck, Germany, and University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain. Before starting my doctoral studies in the EES Program, I held a junior researcher and lecturer position in the Department of Geography at the University of Osnabruck, Germany. My previous research focused on internal and international displacement and categorization of migration. I am currently interested in the transformation of the European border regime, Turkish-Greek border, transit migration and urban refugees in Turkey.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
http://opencuny.org/lydiapelothobbs/
BA, Oberlin College/ MS Urban Studies University of New Orleans

Research Interests: Critical prison studies; the US South; racial capitalism; state-making; social movements; Black radicalism; queer politics; urban studies; oral history; feminist methodologies 

Advisor: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Dissertation Research: The Contested Consolidation of the Louisiana Carceral State (Working Title)

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is a doctoral candidate in Geography and pursuing a certificate in American Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation tracks the dialectical relationship between the formation and contestation of the Louisiana carceral state from the 1970s to the present. A guiding impulse of her work is to produce research that is grounded in and relevant to grassroots organizing for collective liberation. Her writing has been published in a broad range of academic and activist venues including Monthly Review Online, Left Turn Magazine, The Abolitionist, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and in the anthology Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (University of California Press).  

Marlene Nava Ramos
B.S., Cornell University, New York; M.P.H., Columbia University, New York

Research Interests: Immigration enforcement, surplus labor, environmental  justice, participatory action research  

Advisor: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Dissertation Research: United States political economy of immigration enforcement

Marlene Nava Ramos is a doctoral student in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center where she studies the U.S. political economy of immigration enforcement, with a focus on the New York metropolitan region. Ramos currently teaches in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geospatial Sciences at Lehman College.

Affiliations: Women of Color Collective

Nathaniel Sheets
B.A. Geography, University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests: Geography of police power; urban theory,  politics, and development; racism and reform; culture and politics of policing and the policed; social power and self-defense

Advisor: Cindi Katz

Dissertation Research: Progressive Orders: Twenty-First Century Expansion, Inequality, and Reform Of Police Power in Seattle

Nathaniel is from Seattle, Washington, by way of California, where he obtained a B.A. in Geography from UC Berkeley in 2008. He subsequently worked in Los Angeles as a union organizer, while training and competing as an amateur athlete in Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiujitsu, and Mixed Martial Arts. He entered the Ph.D. Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center (CUNY) in 2012. His dissertation project  charts the contested landscape and reform of police power in Seattle, Washington at a moment of unprecedented expansion fortified by the city’s progressive politics and culture.

Elizabeth A. Sibilia
MA, Hunter College, New York; MFA Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; BFA, New School for Social Research, New York

Research Interests: Shipbreaking; International law (maritime, trade, environment and labor); Development theory; Bangladesh Studies; Geographies of waste; Waste-value dialectic; Production of space; Ocean-space as infrastructure space; uneven development

Advisor: Cindi Katz

Dissertation Research: “Space, Labor, and Law: The global production of a landscape for shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh and the problem of ‘waste’”

Elizabeth Sibilia is a doctoral candidate specializing in geography in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at the Graduate Center. Her dissertation examines the historical-geographic, political-economic, and social factors that helped to produce and perpetuate the global landscape of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh. This geographic research investigates the dialectical relationship between the transnational and domestic demolition markets, labor and steel economies in the places where shipbreaking has occurred the past four decades. In placing emphasis on the production of spaces for such markets, her dissertation research reveals a spatiality specific to shipbreaking, where global circulations of capital become dependent on outlets for depreciated commodities. Bangladesh plays an uneven yet critical role. She employs archival data, photographic documentation, interviews, policy papers and reports, legal documents and scholarly research as methods and sources to tell this “toxic history of the present.” She is also working on a visual component as part of her dissertation, that will strategically employ her photographic documentation as punctuations, revealing a secondary story inspired by her research trips and the necessity to visualize that which is difficult to see. An image from this series was on view as part of the Landscape Photographic Exhibit at the Association of American Geographers Annual meeting in Chicago in 2015.

Publications

• "Zones of Risk: the Spaces and Places of Shipbreaking." FOCUS on Geography, Vol. 58 (4) Winter 2015.

• “On the Beach in Bangladesh” in Rare Earth Catalog: Reckoning with the Anthropocene, edited by Elizabeth Knafo and Jesse

• Goldstein. New York: 2014.

• 2012, Participatory mapping installation Co-Organizer, "Welcome to the New York City Waterfront: a peripheral space?" at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY

• 2012, Field trip Co-Organizer, "Waterways-Commodity Ways" (Historical-geographic boat tour of the New York City waterfront), Association of American Geographers Annual Conference, New York, NY

Fellowships & Awards

• 2015 Graduate Center Dissertation Year Fellowship, Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY

• 2015 ARC Knickerbocker Award for Archival Research in American Studies, Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY

• 2014 Human Geography Small Grant, Institute for Human Geography, Worcester, MA

• 2014-2015 American Institute of Bangladesh Studies Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, Madison, Wisconsin

• 2014 Adjunct/ CET Professional Development Grant Professional Staff Congress, CUNY Union

• 2010 Graduate Student Paper Award, Middle States Division AAG

• 2006 Award of Excellence, Graduate School Division, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

Affiliations: American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, Madison, Wisconsin

Samuel Stein
shapeofthecity.blogspot.com
BA, Sarah Lawrence College, Yonkers, NY; MUP, Hunter College, New York, NY

Research Interests: Urbanization; planning; gentrification; uneven development; labor; race; New York City

Advisor: Cindi Katz

Dissertation Research: Labor, Land Use and the Luxury City

Samuel Stein is a human geographer who focuses on urbanization and the politics of planning. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 2005, he worked as a researcher and organizer on union drives, tenant mobilizations and political campaigns, and he pursued a master’s degree in Urban Planning from Hunter College (CUNY). He is now a PhD student in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center, an editor of Progressive Planning Magazine and a professor of geography and urban studies at several New York-area colleges. Stein’s specific research interests include housing policy struggles, gentrification in Manhattan's Chinatown, transportation politics and the complex roles of labor organizations in urban planning processes. He is the author of several articles in academic and popular publications such as Metropolitics, Jacobin, Urban Omnibus, Zeek, and Progressive Planning, and has collaborated on major projects with Hunter College Urban Affairs and Planning faculty members Peter Kwong and Tom Angotti.

Publications

• "Latin Americas, North and South: a Special Issue of Progressive Planning Magazine", number 204, Summer 2015, edited by Samuel Stein and Clara Irazábal, and featuring an introduction by Samuel Stein and Clara Irazábal entitled "The Politics of Planning in Latin America and the Latino US."

• "Precarity and Gentrification: A Feedback Loop." Metropolitics, April 14, 2015.

• “Preserve and Protect Chinatown,” co-authored with Peter Kwong. Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, February 3, 2015.

• “De Blasio’s Doomed Housing Plan.” Jacobin, Fall 2014.

• “Lessons from 20th Century Socialism: The USSR and China,” co-authored with Tom Angotti, in The New Century of the Metropolis: Urban Development and Orientalism, by Tom Angotti, Routledge, 2013.

Fellowships & Awards

• CUNY Graduate Center Fellowship, Fall 2015 – Spring 2020

• Center for New York City Neighborhoods' Policy and Communications Fellowship, Summer 2014

• Hunter College's Certificate for Academic Excellence, January 2012

• Streetsblog's “Streetsie Award” for Best Report, December 2011.

• The Fund for New York City's Community Planning Fellowship, September 2010.

• Hunter College's Urban Planning Research Fellowship, September 2009.

• Sarah Lawrence College's Meredith Fonda Russell Fellowship for International Fieldwork, August 2005.

• Everett Scholarship for Public Service, May 2005.

• Sarah Lawrence College's Amy Cohen Scholarship for Community Partnerships and Service Learning, September 2003.

Angie Winner
MA Hydrology, Albert-Ludwig University, Freiburg, Germany

Research Interests: Social activism; right to food; health geography; scale; urban agriculture; environmental justice

Advisor: Juliana Maantay

Dissertation Research: “Food activism and urban agriculture in postindustrial cities”

I grew up in a small town in Southern Germany. My background is in natural sciences, but I realized that I did not want to exclude people from my research. I am interested in sustainable agriculture and alternative food movements, international political economy of food and agriculture, politics of obesity, environmental health, political ecology, race and food, critical nutrition, and critical human geography.

Affiliations: Urban GIS Lab (Lehman College)

Celeste Winston
BA, Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH)

Research Interests: Black geographies; migration; social justice; urban geography; critical GIS

Advisor: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

I am interested in the ways in which people of the African diaspora are racialized and criminalized in the United States, as well as how those processes of racialization and criminalization are part of a larger project of racial capitalism.