Dr. Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work addresses the historicity and political economy of caste. She is particularly interested in the incorporation of caste into projects of governance and capitalist transformation, and how these projects in turn have shaped the social relations of caste. Her work also considers caste as an instrument of classification and management that has been imagined and deployed in relation to other categories of class, religion, and race. Her first book, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford University Press, 2009; Yoda Press, 2013), chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. Her second book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), analyzes meritocracy as a terrain of caste struggle in India and its implications for democratic transformation.

Dr. Shreya Subramani is an Assistant Professor in the Law & Society Major. She specializes in Legal and Political Anthropology and Black Studies with a focus on the relations between racial inequality, carceral geographies, labor, and city life. Her recent research and current book project offer an ethnographic exploration of the emergent policy and programming infrastructures of prisoner reentry in New Orleans, Louisiana. Through this work, Subramani provides a historically grounded critique of progressive criminal justice reform as a reconfiguration of the racialized/racializing forces of carceral power and elaborates the political potentials of abolitionist praxis.

Dr. John Mollenkopf teaches Political Science and Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, directs its Center for Urban Research, and chairs the public policy subfield in political science. His teaching and research interests focus on urban politics and public policy, using New York City as a case study in comparison with similar large cities in the U.S. and Europe to understand urban political mobilization, immigrant political incorporation, and the formation of governing coalitions. This work seeks to understand how urban policy decisions are made and what consequences they have for different groups and interests, particularly new immigrant groups. He has authored or edited eighteen books on these subjects, most recently Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration (Cornell University Press, 2016), co-edited with Manuel Pastor.

Dr. Keena Lipsitz is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Competitive Elections and the American Voter (University of Pennsylvania, 2011) and a co-author of Campaigns and Elections: Rules, Reality, Strategy and Choice (W.W. Norton, 2012) and Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Participation and What We Can Do About It(Brookings Institution, 2005). She has also published numerous articles in the areas of political communication, political behavior, and democratic theory.