Aukeem Ballard is a former secondary public-school educator, organizer, and school leader whose pedagogy and practices remain grounded in critical love. Aukeem is currently a PhD student in the Berkeley School of Education with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Aukeem's current research focuses on the gendered and racialized educational experiences, conditions, and practices that constitute (and are shaped by) phenomena such as love, hope, healing, and courage as mediated through, thereby informing, often oppressive and dehumanizing spaces. Aukeem seeks to highlight and...
Xavier Durham (he/him) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley whose interests revolve around policing, surveillance, state violence, punishment, inequality, and urban sociology. His current project focuses on the precarious convergence between formerly-incarcerated people and neoliberal security practices in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, examining how the policed become the police as they navigate a constrained labor market. Previously, he has done extensive work on police use of force during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as well as the constitutional...
Akilah Favors is an energetic free-spirited activist who loves to smile. She is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at UC Berkeley who researches race, class, social movements, gentrification, and the politics of inclusion. Her work investigates how Black middle-class organizers mobilize low-income renters against urban displacement rooted in neoliberalism and systemic racism in Atlanta, GA. She employs urban ethnography and in-depth interviews to analyze how both practices of division and solidarity influence the sustainability of Blackness in the city. Her work contributed to a national...
Caylee Hong is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she researches urban oil production in the Los Angeles Basin. Her dissertation examines the ways that diverse stakeholders navigate the decommissioning and redevelopment of century-old oil fields in the heart of cities, including Los Angeles and Long Beach. She has published research on infrastructure finance, the environment, law, and citizenship in Antipode and Anthropological Theory. Prior to Berkeley,...