speaker bios
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speakers (h-q)



                        A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A


Kat Aaron is Co-Director of People's Production House. PPH is a media justice organization in New York City, which trains youth and workers as radio journalists. Our work combines media production, media analysis, and media policy. We build media organizers: media literate youth and workers who can create and demand a media system that works in their interests. Kat is also a producer for Wakeup Call, the morning news show at WBAI 99.5 FM in New York. She is formerly the Communications Director at the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project. Check PPH out online at www.peoplesproductionhouse.org.

Younes Abouayoub studied American and British Literature at Hassan II University in Morocco, Applied Foreign Languages at the Sorbonne, Paris III, Geopolitics at Saint-Denis University Paris VIII, and Political Sociology at Denis-Diderot University, Paris VII, where he received his Masters. He has also been a visiting scholar at Columbia. He is currently finishing his Ph.D. dissertation on “Interest Groups Politics in the USA: Arab-Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East.” He is among the founding members of the AMI, American Moroccan Institute in New York, where he currently lives.

Bashir Abu-Manneh teaches English at Barnard. His writings on Israel-Palestine appear on ZNet.


Gilbert Achcar is a Lebanese-French academic, writer, and socialist activist, teaching politics at the University of Paris VIII. Among his most recent books are The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (2d ed., 2006) with Noam Chomsky, Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) with Michel Warschawski,The 33-day War: Israel’s War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and its Consequences (2007)--all three from Paradigm Publishers.

Seth Adler is an independent scholar. He recently received his Ph.D. in sociology from UC Santa Cruz. He is long time peace and justice activist, and has taught courses in sociology and community studies at University of California at Santa Cruz and at New College of California.

Ujju Aggarwal is a Desi woman who is part of the collective of the Center for Immigrant Families. She has participated in local and national initiatives to address issues of violence against women, immigrants' rights, and racial justice. Center for Immigrant Families (CIF) is a collectively-run, popular education-based community organizing center for low-income adult immigrant women of color in uptown Manhattan. CIF addresses, in a holistic way, the inter-connected challenges facing immigrant women by linking our personal well-being, health, and development to concrete and sustained organizing that is focused on the root causes of the challenges we face.

Michael Albert is the co-conceiver of the economic vision called participatory economics, an author of numerous books and articles, a frequent public speaker, a long time activist, and an organizer of diverse projects. He currently works at Z Magazine, Z Media Institute, and primarily for the ZNet website. His most recent book is a memoir of the past four decades titled Remembering Tomorrow: From SDS to Life After Capitalism.

Amanda Alexander is a Ph.D. student in the history department at Columbia University and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.

Khalil Almustafa is an outstanding poet/satirist and is a leader in the Uptown Youth for Peace and Justice based in Harlem and Bronx. He is currently a performer and speaker on the “Hip-Hop is Dead Tour” spearheaded by Rosa Clemente of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement – the follow-up to the "Speak Truth to Power Tour" (2003-05). The tour is dedicated to raising consciousness about identity, the war, the role of hip-hop, sexism, reparations and political prisoners.


Sabah Alnasseri, born in Basrah (Iraq), is a Professor for Political Science (Middle East Politics) at the York University, Toronto. Prior to that he was a Lecturer of Political Science at the J.-W.-G.-University, Frankfurt. Currently he is working on an article, “Understanding Iraq,” for the Socialist Register.

Christopher Anderson is completing his doctoral studies at Columbia University, focusing on journalistic authority, media history, and new media technologies. He works for the NYC Independent Media Center and the NYC Independent, and his academic writings have appeared in The Handbook of Journalism Studies, Making Our Media, The International Encyclopedia of Communication, and The Media and Social Theory. He is organizing the 2007 Columbia University conference, "Conversations and Communications: A Colloquium in Honor of James Carey," and was a founding organizer of the 2003 New York City Grassroots Media Conference.

Gary L. Anderson is professor of Educational Leadership at NYU. He is a former middle and high school teacher and principal. He has just finished co-editing (with Kathryn Herr) the three-volume Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (Sage Publications).


Anatole Anton is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and former chair of the department. He was also co-coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association and part of SFSU's minor in critical social thought. He writes and researches in the areas of political and social philosophy, philosophy of social science and Hegel and Marx. He recently edited Not For Sale: In Defense of Public Goods with Milton Fisk and Nancy Holmstrom. He was also an active participant in the student/faculty strike of 1968/69.

Jean Anyon is the author most recently of Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement and Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Education. In a forthcoming article she argues that No Child Left Behind functions on the social policy level as a substitute for job creation policies. She teaches Education Policy in the Doctoral Program in Urban Education in the City University of New York.

Anthony Arnove is the editor, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which has been read in dramatic performances nationwide since 2004. The Culture Project in New York will produce a theatrical adaptation in 2007. Arnove’s latest book is Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (foreword by Zinn). Arnove also edited the critically acclaimed Iraq Under Siege. A Brooklyn-based activist, member of the International Socialist Organization and the National Writers Union, Arnove writes regularly for ZNet and sits on the editorial boards of the International Socialist Review and Haymarket Books.

Stanley Aronowitz is the co-managing editor of the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. He is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he has directed the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work since 1988. He is the author or editor of over 20 books, including How Class Works (Yale, 2003), Just Around the Corner: The Paradox of Jobless Recovery (Temple, 2005), and, most recently, Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (Paradigm, 2006).

Brian Ashley was the Director of the Alternative Information and Development Centre, a prominent organisation in facilitating the building of struggles against neoliberal globalisation in South Africa. He was founder member of the third world anti-debt movement Jubilee South and has been active in struggles against the World Trade Organisation. He is also a prominent member of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign in South Africa.

Beniam Awash is senior research aide at the Institute for Asian and Asian American Studies and a doctoral candidate in sociology at Binghamton University. His research focuses on peace and conflict in the Horn of Africa, political Islam, Sino-African relations, and the relationship between knowledge, power and development policy. He is a freelance writer on foreign policy, Horn of Africa, and global energy security.

B

Kate Bahn is a recent Hampshire College graduate who concentrated in Economics and Political Economy. She is currently working in Finance Operations for a market research website.

Sung E. Bai works with CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities (also known as Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence), which was founded by Asian women in 1986. CAAAV focuses on institutional violence that affects immigrant, poor, and working-class communities and on issues such as worker exploitation, concentrated urban poverty, police brutality, immigrant detention and deportation, and criminalization of youth and workers. By organizing across diverse, low-wage, and poor Asian communities in New York City, CAAAV exposes and struggles against violence with the goal of building community capacity to exercise self-determination.

Andy Banks is Campaigns Director in the Teamsters' Department of Strategic Research and Campaigns. He has been senior faculty at the AFL-CIO's George Meany Center for Labor Studies/National Labor College and has served as International Representative of the Teamsters in their Office of Strategic Campaigns where he focused on campaigns against multinationals like Royal Ahold, Volkswagen, UPS and Coca-Cola. He was Education and Development Secretary of Public Services International, the Geneva-based global union federation of public sector trade unions. Banks was the first coordinator of Jobs With Justice.

Amiri Baraka is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism. He is a poet and political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. He has taught at the New School for Social Research, San Francisco State College, Yale University, George Washington University, and SUNY Stony Brook.

Marleen S. Barr teaches in the Department of Communication and Media at Fordham University. She has received the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Her books include Feminist Fabulation, Genre Fission, and Alien to Femininity. She recently published Oy Pioneer!, a humorous feminist academic novel.

Hatem Bazian received his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Islamic Studies from Berkeley. Bazian is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies and an adjunct professor of law at Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley. His courses include Islamic Law and Society, Islam in America, and Middle East Studies. His latest book is Jerusalem in Islamic Consciousness. As an activist, he has played significant roles in many Bay Area human and civil rights movements. He was Editor-in-Chief of Discourse Magazine, a progressive monthly, and co-hosted Islam Today on KPFA.

Michael G. Bennett is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Social Science at Michigan Technological University. He has a Ph.D. from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the ethical, legal and societal implications of emerging technologies, and the intersection of race and technology.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Among her books are Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's U.N. and Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis. In early 1999 she participated in a 22-city speaking tour on Iraq sanctions with U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday. She works closely with United for Peace and Justice, and since 2002 has played an active role in the growing global peace movement.

Melody Berger graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with a degree in Women's Studies. She is the creator/editor of the F-WORD zine, a brand-spankin' new feminist publication for teens/youthful people (that was just nominated for an Utne Indie Press Award), and the editor of We Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, out now on Seal press. When she's not raising a ruckus in the political arena, Melody likes to play bluegrass fiddle and sing a bit.

Rafael Bernabe is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras. He is the author of Respuestas al Colonialismo (1996), and, most recently, Manual para organizer velorioso (2003). He is the spokesperson for the Frente Socialista and former president of the Asociacion de Profesores Puertorriqueños (APPU).

Alberto Bernárdez is the Recording Secretary for District 10 of the Service Employees International Union 32BJ.

Frida Berrigan is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. She is the co-author of the widely-cited Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict? and tracks the economics of war and militarism.

Peter Bohmer has been active in movements for social and economic change in the United States, against U.S. intervention abroad and in solidarity with revolutionary struggles in may parts of the world for almost 40 years. He has a Ph. D. in economics and teaches political economy at the Evergreen State College. In 2001, he taught economics at the University of Havana and also worked for the Nicaraguan government in 1988. A major interest of his has been and continues to be developing and furthering participatory socialist alternatives to capitalism.

Jacqueline Brady teaches in the English Department at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. Her research focuses on the intersection of radical teaching and student-centered learning. She is on the editorial board of Radical Teacher.

Fernando Braga is an Army reservist who lives in the Bronx. He is a veteran of the Iraq war.

Jack Z. Bratich is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. His book, Conspiracy Panics: Popular Culture and Political Rationality, will be published with SUNY Press in 2008. He writes about public secrecy, media audiences, and reality television from an autonomist perspective. His essay “Becoming-Seattle: the State of Activism and the (Re)activity of the State” appears in the current issue of Fifth Estate (#374, Winter 2007).

Peter Bratsis teaches political theory at the University of Salford. He is the author of Everyday Life and the State, the editor (with Stanley Aronowitz) of Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered, and is a member of the Situations editorial collective.

Rose M. Brewer is Professor of African American & African Studies at The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She has written extensively on Black families, race, class and gender, social and political change. Her coauthored book The Color of Wealth (2006) received the Gustavus-Meyers Book Award for best books on bigotry and human rights. She's a member of the board of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide, has served on the board of United for a Fair Economy, and is a founding member the Black Radical Congress.

Steve Brier is Vice President for Information Technology and External Programs at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is co-director of the New Media Lab. Brier co-founded the American Social History Project at CUNY was its executive director for 18 years. He is the supervising editor and co-author of the award-winning Who Built America?, a multimedia history curriculum which includes a number of other award-winning historical documentary videos, CD-ROMS, and Websites. He has published numerous articles on new media and history.

Kate Bronfenbrenner is the Director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where she is also on faculty. She is the co-author and editor of several books on including Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' Victory and the Revival of American Labor, Union Organizing in the Public Sector: An Analysis of State and Local Elections, and Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies. Bronfenbrenner worked for many years as an organizer and business agent with the United Woodcutters Association in Mississippi and SEIU in Boston.

Dennis Brutus is professor emeritus of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He was a political prisoner in South Africa and remains active on issues of racism, anti-war, and corporate globalization. He is a member of Jubilee South Africa and the African Social Forum. Recent publications include Leafdrift (Whirlwind Press) and Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader (Haymarket Press). He is currently a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.

Robb Burlage is an occassional lecturer in public health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and a Senior Management Consultant at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. He is a long-time health care activist, founder of the Health Policy Advisory Center (Health/PAC), and founding member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC).

Melanie E. L. Bush is an Assistant Professor at Adelphi University, Garden City, NY. Her book Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Forms of Whiteness is based on her research and work at Brooklyn College. In 2003 she was a prize winner of the Praxis Award for outstanding achievement in translating knowledge into action in addressing contemporary social problems.

C

George Caffentzis is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine and a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. He helped edit two books with the Collective, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War, both published by Autonomedia.

Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University in New York. At Syracuse he is a member of the International Relations Faculty in the Maxwell School and is the Chair of the Africa Initiative of Syracuse University.  He teaches courses on African Politics, African International Relations, Pan Africanism and Introduction to African American Studies. His most recent books are Reclaiming Zimbabwe: the Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation and Pan-Africanism, Pan-Africanists, and African Liberation in the 21st Century (New Academia Publishers, Washington).

Jennifer Camper is a cartoonist and graphic artist. Her books include Rude Girls and Dangerous Women, a collection of her cartoons, and subGURLZ, a graphic novella about the adventures of three women living in abandoned subway tunnels. Camper is also the editor of the comix anthology series Juicy Mother. Camper, a gay Lebanese-American, often uses her art in her activist work in the queer and Arab-American communities. Her cartoons and illustrations have appeared in magazines, newspapers, comic books and anthologies, and have been exhibited in the US and Europe. Website: www.jennifercamper.com

Antonio Carmona-Baez teaches comparative politics and international relations at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. In 2002, he received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is author of State Resistance to Globalisation in Cuba (2004) and various academic articles concerning popular and state responses to neoliberal globalisation in the Caribbean, Latin America and internationally. Carmona-Baez is co-founder of the Puerto Rico Social Forum.

Graham Cassano teaches social theory, race and ethnicity, gender, and the sociology of globalization in the Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, Storrs and serves on the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism. He has published on Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and the American labor movement. He is currently at work on a study of cinematic representations of organized labor during the 1930s and 1940s.

Karen Charman is Managing Editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism. She is also an independent investigative environmental journalist whose work has appeared in World Watch, Sierra, FAIR’s journal Extra!, TomPaine.com, The Nation, In These Times and many other publications.

Kassahun Checole is the founder and President of Africa World Press and Red Sea Press. He did his doctoral work at State University of New York at Binghamton with specialization in political economy and development. He later taught at several colleges including Rutgers University in New Jersey and El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico-City. Checole has been involved in the politics of the Horn of Africa since his days as an undergraduate.

Deng Chenming, Ph.D., Professor at the Institute of Contemporary Marxism of Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of Communist Party of China. He is also a visiting professor at Harbin Institute of Technology and at Beijing Technology and Business University. His main research area is World Economy. His Ph.D. dissertation is on Deng Xiaoping’s Idea of International Economy. He has published several articles concerning the impact of the oil problem on China’s economic development, the development of the northeast industrial base in China, the WTO, and the world economy.

Erin Cherry received her B.A. in Theatre from UNLV and her M.F.A. from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she studied under Maggie Flannigan and William Esper. Her credits include: Opal in McReele (WellFleet Harbor Actors Theatre); Yolands in Crowns (St. Louis Rep & Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park); Reb in Beth Henley's Exposed, directed by David Esbjornson (NYSF); Bobo in The Blacks: A Clown Show (Classical Theatre of Harlem); Ermina in Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Capitol Rep); New Doors (Guthrie Lab); Lady in the Dark (Prince Music Theatre.) Television credits include: Law and Order.

Vivek Chibber teaches sociology at New York University. He is the author of Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton University Press, 2003).

Staceyann Chin has been an out poet and political agitator for as long as she has been a writer. From the first angry rants delivered at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe to poetry workshops in Europe to co-writing and performing in Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Chin writes, speaks, and breathes in hopes of a world without poverty, prejudice or injustice. Her work appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. She wrote three critically-acclaimed one-woman plays. The film Staceyann Chin was released in Danish theaters. She is currently writing a memoir for Scribner of Simon & Schuster.

Merlin Chowkwanyun is a health care activist and Ph.D. student in History at the University of Pennsylvania, studying the history of urban health inequality, policy, and activism.

Richard Clapp is a Professor of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health and an Adjunct Professor at the UMass-Lowell. Prof. Clapp is an epidemiologist with over thirty years of experience in public health practice, teaching and consulting. He is Co-Chair of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility. His research has included studies of cancer around nuclear facilities, in military veterans, and in communities with toxic hazards. Clapp has served as an expert witness in major lawsuits against polluters. His most recent work has studied the health of 9/11 rescue workers.

John P. Clark is the Gregory F. Curtin Distinguished Professor in Humane Letters and the Professions at Loyola University New Orleans. His most recent book is Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Élisee Reclus. He moderates Research on Anarchism, an international multilingual discussion list and archives, and writes a column, "Imagined Ecologies," for Capitalism Nature Socialism. He has been active for many years in the green movement, local grassroots politics, and ecological forestry.

Marilyn Clement, National Coordinator of Healthcare-NOW, works with organizers nationwide to build a movement for a comprehensive single-payer national health care system that will cover every resident in the US with quality healthcare by the end of 2009. She formerly worked for Dr. King, was Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She has produced two films concerning the challenges to the Seattle WTO meeting in 1999 and the WSF in Brazil in 2003, along with other films, articles, and training materials about economic justice issues.

Patricia Ticineto Clough is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her most recent publications are Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minnesota University Press, 2000) and an edited collection titled The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2007.

Alyson Cole is an assistant professor in the political science department at Queens College of the City University of New York, where she teaches classes in political thought, feminism, racial politics, public law and outsider jurisprudence. She is the author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Janet Coleman is Arts Director at WBAI where she produces Cat Radio Café, The Next Hour, and Gore Vidal Speaks Heresy. Her publications include two books: The Compass: The Improvisational Theater That Revolutionized American Comedy, and (with Al Young) Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs. She played Evelyn Lincoln in the film Thirteen Days, Emily Ann Andrews in David Dozer's radio comedy series Poisoned Arts, and was recently heard on Pacifica Radio’s Mushroom Cloud Theatre. She has taught improvisation at the Actors Studio, The Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, and The New School.

Paul Collins, born in Durban, South Africa, is the Anti-Racist Coordinator on the Coordinating Committee of the Young Democratic Socialists (YDS). He is a political science major at Gordon College in Massachusetts.

Harvey Cox, Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School, is the author of many books, including The Secular City, When Jesus Came to Harvard, The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity, and The Seduction of the Spirit. He is a contributing editor of Religious Socialism.

Randy Credico is a political comedian and activist whose life is the subject of an award-winning documentary directed by Laura Kightlinger and produced by actor Jack Black. His stand-up career ranged from Vegas nightclubs to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to political demonstrations. For the past decade, he has directed the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. Credico founded Mothers of the NY Disappeared, a group of ex-prisoners and families of those incarcerated under the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Their campaign led to drug-law changes in 2004. He continues to do stand-up comedy for progressive causes.

D


Michael da Cruz is a recent transfer student to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island from McGill University in Montreal. At Brown he is a member of SDS and is working on issues of accessible education, student power, and community building on the left. At McGill he worked with GRASPé (GrassRoots Association for Student Power), pushing for democracy within the McGill student union and the larger University, for bringing McGill into the wider Quebec Student Movement, and fighting for universally accessible education. He also works with the Providence IWW.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia. His highly acclaimed writings on Iran, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art, include Theology of Discontent; Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future; Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. His forthcoming book, Iran: A People Interrupted is published by The New Press in March. He lives in New York City.

Benjamin Dangl has worked as an independent journalist around the world, writing for publications such as Z Magazine, The Progressive and The Nation. His main focus is Latin America, where he has written about Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba and Venezuela. He is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007). Dangl won a Project Censored Award for his coverage of US military operations in Paraguay. An essay of his was recently published in the McGraw-Hill college textbook Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Latin American Issues.

Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York. He is the author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press), and co-editor, with Malini Johar Schueller, of Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (forthcoming from Duke University Press), as well as of many articles on postcolonial literature and theory.

Susie Day writes a monthly political satire column for New York's Gay City News, Monthly Review Zine (www.mrzine.org), and other quality commie-fag publications. She also performs her work on local station WBAI and various other tawdry locations, not unlike this panel.  She is your leader.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. He is Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and Director of the Center of Documentation on the Revolution of 1974, at the same University. He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, and German.

Patrick Deer is Assistant Professor of English at New York University, where he focuses on war culture, modernism, the twentieth-century novel and film, and postcolonial and cultural studies. He has recently completed the manuscript of Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature. His published work includes “The Dogs of War: Myths of British Anti-Americanism,” in AntiAmericanism, ed. Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross (New York University Press), and “Defusing The English Patient,” an essay on the film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel commissioned for A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. Robert Stam (Basil Blackwell).

Mary Des Chene is an anthropologist and human rights activist who has worked in Nepal over the past twenty years. She is a founding editor of the Kathmandu-based journal Studies in Nepali History and Society.

Judy Deutsch, is Minister Emerita of the First Parish, Unitarian Universalist, Medfield, Mass. She has been a member of DSOC (the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) and a member of DSA since its inception. She works for single-payer, universal health care as chair of Mass-Care's legislative committee, as vice-chair of Mass-Care, and chair of the Massachusetts and Sudbury League of Women Voters health care committees.

Guy L. deVeaux is a Retired School Teacher of Mathematics from the New York City Department of Education. He is a member of the Coordinating Committee of New York Chapter of the Black Radical Congress. He participates in numerous organizations with a social justice agenda, including Association of Black Educators of New York, New York Alliance of Black School Educators, Educators against Apartheid, Veterans for Peace, The African American Heritage Committee of United Federation of Teachers. He is a life member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity and a Former Board Member of the Algebra Project.

William DiFazio is professor of sociology at St. John's University. He is the author of Ordinary Poverty: A Little Food and Cold Storage and co-author (with Stanley Aronowitz) of The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work. He is the host of CityWatch on WBAI-New York, 99.5FM. He teaches at the Brecht Forum.

Chris Dixon is a longtime anti-authoritarian activist and a graduate student in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His writing appears online, in magazines, and in Global Uprising (New Society Press, 2001), Letters from Young Activists (Nation Books, 2005), A New Socialism for A New Generation (Lexington Books, forthcoming), and Men Speak Out: ProFeminist Views on Gender, Sex and Power (Routledge, forthcoming).

Bernardine Dohrn, activist, academic and child advocate, is Director of the Children and Family Justice Center and Clinical Associate Professor of the Northwestern University School Law. Dohrn was a leader of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. She is an author and co-editor of two books: A Century of Juvenile Justice (2002) and Resisting Zero Tolerance: A Handbook for Parents, Teachers and Students (2001). Dohrn teaches juvenile justice, human rights and international law at Northwestern and is a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Vrije University in Amsterdam.

Monique Dols has been an activist at Columbia University since the Fall of 2000. After 9/11, Monique organized opposition to the war on Afghanistan and later helped to initiate the Campus Antiwar Network in the lead up to the war on Iraq. She was also central to the fight to defend Middle Eastern professors who were targeted by the right-wing at Columbia and her writings defending academic freedom appeared in Socialist Worker, Counterpunch and Electronic Intifada.

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Dr. Dorrien is the author of twelve books and approximately 150 articles that range across the fields of ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics and history. They include three books on economic democracy and social ethics, two books on political neoconservatism, and a trilogy titled The Making of American Liberal Theology.

David Dozer is a playwright and actor whose long-running radio comedy series, Poisoned Arts, debuted on WBAI in 1967. His work has been published in Scripts and The Best Short Plays of 1999-2000, and performed in the repertory of The Dada NYNY Dadas. He appears as Sergeant Groves on TV’s M.A.S.H. His other acting credits include Young Doctors in Love, Dog Day Afternoon, Hackers, Blue Thunder, Comedy is Not Pretty, and A Wild and Crazy Guy. He created, wrote and performed in Mushroom Cloud Theatre for Pacifica Radio's Informed Dissent.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, writer, historian, and teacher from rural Oklahoma transplanted to San Francisco. She is the author most recently of a memoir series, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie; Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975; and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War.

E

Steve Early is a Boston-based international union rep and organizing coordinator for Communications Workers of America District 1, which represents more than 175,000 workers in New York, New England, and New Jersey. Early has written about the AFL-CIO split and other labor issues for The Boston Globe, Dollars and Sense, Working USA, Against the Current, Labor Notes, Tikkun, Our Times, and many other publications. He is currently working on a book for Cornell University Press about the role of New Left and Sixties' movement activists in American unions over the last four decades.

Alice Echols is associate professor of English at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75 and Sweet Scars of Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, among other books.

Beka Economopoulos has been a field organizer for environmental, economic and social justice organizations for the past 12 years. She now manages Greenpeace's online organizing program, where she develops and uses technology tools to coordinate scalable offline grassroots organizing efforts, and develops outreach and advocacy strategies in online social networks. She is a founding member of Not An Alternative, a non-profit arts collective and cultural production company, and she organizes Brunch 2.0, a quarterly event that promotes the meaningful cross-pollination of geeks, activists, and artists over eggs and pancakes.

Kimberly Egge is a sophomore at Pace University and studies Sociology and Anthropology. She has been a member of Students for a Democratic Society since February 2006. With SDS she has found interest in the anti-war movement and gender balance within the Left. She has also been active with freedom of expression issues on campus.

John Ehrenberg is a Professor of Political Science at Long Island University—Brooklyn. He has been teaching, writing, and speaking about the history of political thought for many years. His latest book, Servants of Wealth: The Right's Assault on Economic Justice, was published in September. He has also written an intellectual and political biography of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an examination of Marxism's theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and a history of the notion of civil society. He has also contributed many articles to professional journals and remains actively involved in contemporary political life.

Jeff Eichler, Coordinator of the RWDSU’s Retail Action Project, has been in the labor movement since 1978 when he was a rank-and-file activist in the AFT local representing NYU clerical and technical staff. Since, he has held a number of staff positions with different unions representing a range of workers. In 1999, Jeff became Organizing Director of UNITE Local 169/ Amalgamated Northeast Regional Joint Board where he directed the union’s greengrocer campaign.

Hester Eisenstein is a professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She was director of the Queens College Women’s Studies Program from 1996 to 2000, a femocrat in Sydney, New South Wales, from 1981 to 1988, and has taught at Yale, Barnard, and SUNY Buffalo. She is Vice Chair of the Queens College chapter of the Professional Staff Congress. Her writings include Contemporary Feminist Thought (1983) and "A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization," Science and Society (July 2005); she is currently working on a book based on this article for Columbia UPress.

Jill Soffiyah Elijah serves as Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School. In that capacity she is responsible for leading the fulfillment, development and expansion of the Institute’s work to address the urgent needs of the powerless, voiceless and indigent in the criminal justice system. She also supervises third-year law students in the representation of adult and juvenile clients. Professor Elijah has authored several articles and publications based on her research of the U.S. criminal justice and prison systems. Over the past 22 years, she has represented numerous political prisoners and social activists.

Steven Ellner has taught political science at the Universidad de Oriente in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela since 1977 and has written several books and scores of articles on the Venezuelan Left and labor movement. He is co-editor of The Latin American Left: From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika (1993) and Venezuelan Politics in the Chávez Era: Class, Polarization and Conflict (2003). He has published regularly in In These Times and NACLA: Report on the Americas. His forthcoming book, Venezuela Reconsidered: Hugo Chavez and the Emergence of Revisionism, will be published by Zed Books.

Tod Ensign is a lawyer, author and the director of Citizen Soldier, a GI and vets rights organization. He is also a sponsor of the Different Drummer internet café, the first GI project of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Noura Erakat is a Palestinian-American legal-activist. Upon graduating from Boalt Hall Law School at UC Berkeley, she received a New Voices Fellowship to work as the National Grassroots Organizer and Legal Advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is currently a steering committee member of AMWAJ, Arab Movement of Women Arising for Justice.

Zack Exley is a Senior Strategist with OMP, a DC-based communications and fundraising firm, and co-founder and president of the New Organizing Institute. He directed the online campaigns for the British Labor Party's 2005 re-election and Kerry-Edwards 2004, served as Organizing Director at MoveOn.org, and played a part in the Dean Internet campaign. Zack speaks on progressive strategy and online organizing, advocacy and fundraising, appearing as a commentator on cable news shows, All Things Considered, BBC News Hour. He has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, New York Observer, LA Times, CNN, Wired News, and elsewhere.

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Liza Featherstone is a contributing writer at The Nation magazine. A freelance journalist and critic, her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Columbia Journalism Review, Newsday, Ms., Salon, and many other publications. She is co-author of Students Against Sweatshops, which was published by Verso in June 2002. Her second book, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic Books, 2004) is now in paperback. Featherstone teaches political writing at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Deepa Fernandes is a bilingual radio journalist, features producer, and a leading activist in the international media democracy movement. Fernandes currently hosts the daily three-hour morning radio show, Wake Up Call, on Pacifica's affiliate station, WBAI, in New York. Seven Stories Press released Fernandes' first book, Targeted: National Security and the Big Business of Immigration, in January 2007. In Targeted, Fernandes weaves together history, political analysis, and first-person narratives of people caught in the grips of the increasingly Kafkaesque U.S. Homeland Security system.

Sujatha Fernandes is an assistant professor of Sociology at Queens College CUNY. She has done research on social movements in India, Cuba, and Venezuela, and is the author of Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, October 2006). Sujatha has written on progressive issues for Colorlines, ZNet, and Corpwatch, and she has produced radio reports for WBAI and Pacifica radio.

Hector Figueroa is Vice President of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in New York City.

Karen Finley is a controversial performance artist. Her Karen Finley Live DVD (2004) compiles performances of Shut Up and Love Me and Make Love. Finley is the recipient of both an Obie Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship for The American Chestnut.

Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a professor at Brooklyn College and former President and CEO of TransAfrica Forum. He formerly served as the Vice President for International Trade Union Development Programs for the George Meany Center of the AFL-CIO, the Education Director and Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO. A graduate of Harvard, he has authored numerous articles, and is co-author of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941. Fletcher has also been an adjunct faculty member at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

Anamaría Flores is a Teaching Fellow in writing and literature at Queens College-CUNY. She has published in Socialism and Democracy and reviews Latina/o literature. At present she is writing her dissertation, "Recuperation, Reunion, and Rememory: Racial Politics in the Literature of the Americas."

Jennifer Flynn is the Executive Director of the NYC AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), a membership organization comprised and led by low-income people living with HIV/AIDS. NYCAHN participated in the NYC SF and is a member of the National Planning Committee of the US Social Forum. Jennifer holds a Masters degree from the New School for Social Research and is a member of the Northeast region planning committee of the United States Social Forum.

Barbara Foley works in literary radicalism, Marxist theory, and African American writers and the Left. She has authored three books. Her latest is Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Illinois, 2003). She is currently working on a book about Ralph Ellison. Foley is a member of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association; on the editorial collective of Science and Society; and Chair of the Combating Racism Task Force of NOW-NJ. She is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.

John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance and Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (both published by Monthly Review Press). He has recently written on "Monopoly-Finance Capital" (Monthly Review, December 2006).

Harriet Fraad is a Marxist psychotherapist in New York City. She has published in Rethinking Marxism, The Journal of Psychohistory, and Critical Sociology. She is currently working on a new edition of her book, Bringing It All Back Home, written with Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff and now edited by Graham Cassano. She is the President of the International Psychohistory Association.

Jean Franco is professor emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is coeditor of the Cultural Studies of the Americas series at Minnesota University Press and general editor of the Library of Latin America series at Oxford University Press. Her most recent book, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America and the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2001) was awarded the Bolton-Johnson Prize by the Conference of Latin American Historians for the best work in English on the History of Latin America.

Peter Freund is Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University. He has written on health, the body, and the automobile.

Mercedes Frias was born in Santo Domingo. In the 1980s she worked in cooperative projects involving Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic as well as in the human rights and women's movements. From 1990 she has lived in Italy. She has been active in public projects for intercultural education, native and immigrant women's associations, interventions against racism and discrimination and for the rights of citizenship. After serving as Environmental Assessor of the city of Empoli in Tuscany and Vice-President of the Network “New Municipalities,” she is now a Deputy (Rifondazione Comunista) to the Italian Parliament.

Bill Friedheim is an award-winning webmaster for the Professional Staff Congress (AFT #2334), the union for faculty and professional staff at the City University of New York. He is also the webmaster for several union-related and anti-war websites for academics. An author and retired professor, he has directed faculty development projects for both university and high school faculty on how to integrate technology into the classroom in ways that promote progressive pedagogy.

Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute, a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University, and one of the nation's leading analysts of urban health. She is the author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It and The House of Joshua: Meditations on Family and Place. Her work on AIDS is featured in Jacob Levenson's The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS in Black America. Her current work focuses on the connection between urban function and mental health.

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Jeannette Gabriel is a Ph.D. student in American History at the CUNY Graduate Center currently working on the unemployed workers movement in the 1930s. She works with NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee which has been fighting against the illegal detention and torture of immigrants since 9/11. Gabriel is also a member of the Workers Democracy Network.

Satya Gabriel is professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College and author of Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision. He is also academic coordinator of the Rural Development Leadership Network and former director of education and chief economist for the Urban League of Greater Portland, Oregon.

Heather Gautney is an assistant professor at Towson University in Maryland. She completed her Ph.D. at the City University of New York Graduate Center; her dissertation was titled “When the Empire Falls: The World Social Forum, Between Protest and Political Organization.” She is co-editor (with Stanley Aronowitz) of Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century.

Christine Gauvreau, currently the director of the Labor Art and Mural Project, has spent a lifetime exploring ways to give working people a voice in U.S. politics. Gauvreau ran a socialist campaign for U.S Senate in 1984 while working as a machinist at the Lynn, Massachusetts General Electric plant. As a member of the OCAW, she attended the founding convention of the Labor Party and worked the shop floor on the Labor Party's behalf. In the mid-term election, she promoted the socialist campaign of Jeff Mackler among antiwar activists nationwide.

Irene Gendzier teaches political science at Boston University. She co-edited, with Richard Falk and R.J. Lifton, Crimes of War (Nation Books, 2006), and authored Notes From the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945-1958 (Columbia University Press, 2006). "Exporting Death as Democracy: An Essay on US Foreign Policy in Lebanon" and "Democracy, Deception and the Arms Trade: the U.S., Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction" have appeared in ZNet and MERIP. Her current book project is titled Dying to Forget: US Foreign Policy in the Middle East.

Marvin Gettleman is a member of the Science and Society editorial board, and a member of the steering committee of Historians Against the War. His latest book (with Stuart Schaar) is The Middle East and Islamic World Reader. His current project is a study of the U.S. Communist Party's schools.

Reza Ghorashi has a Ph.D. in economics from Fordham University and teaches at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. His areas of research and interest are international trade, globalization, and the Middle East, particularly Iran. He has published articles in both English and Farsi on these topics.

Adolfo Gilly is Professor of Social and Political Science at the National Autonomous University Of Mexico. He has been a visiting professor at University of Chicago, Columbia, University of Maryland, Stanford, Yale, and NYU. His English language publications include The Mexican Revolution (New Press, 2005). He writes regularly for La Jornada. In 1991 and 1996 he was a researcher-in-residence at the National Humanities Center and was awarded grants from the Macarthur and Guggenheim foundations. His recent essay, "Bolivia: A 21st-Century Revolution," appeared in Socialism and Democracy (November 2005).

Jonah Gindin writes regularly for Venezuelanalysis.com, an editorially independent website produced by individuals who are dedicated to disseminating news and analysis about the current political situation in Venezuela. His writings have also appeared in Monthly Review and on ZNet.

Eric Glynn has taught economics at Northeastern and Quinnipiac and works as a data analyst for a consulting firm. He is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.


Tami Gold is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College. She co-produced and directed the new documentary, Land, Rain and Fire: Report from Oaxaca. Gold launched her carer in the Newsreel Film Collective of the anti-Vietnam War movement at the age of 20, and has since produced and directed over 20 films about controversial or often ignored subjects including Making A Killing: Phillip Morris, Kraft and Global Tobacco Addiction (2000), Another Brother (1999), Out At Work: Lesbians and Gay Men On the Job (1997) and Juggling Gender (1992).

Gertrude Schaffner ("Trudy") Goldberg is co-founder and chair of the National Jobs for All Coalition. Professor of Social Policy at Adelphi University and director of its Ph.D. program in Social Work, Goldberg is co-author of "Diminishing Welfare: A Cross-National Study of Social Provision." (2002)

Harmony Goldberg, a co-founder of the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) in San Francisco, is currently a student of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Priscilla Gonzalez is an Ecuadorian-Cuban woman who is part of the collective of the Center for Immigrant Families. She has engaged in political work with communities in southern Africa and Latin America. Center for Immigrant Families (CIF) is a collectively-run, popular education-based community organizing center for low-income adult immigrant women of color in uptown Manhattan. CIF addresses, in a holistic way, the inter-connected challenges facing immigrant women by linking our personal well-being, health, and development to concrete and sustained organizing that is focused on the root causes of the challenges we face.

Michael González-Cruz received his Ph.D. from Binghamton University in 2005. He is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. He is the author of Nacionalismo revolucionario puertorriqueño (2006). Currently he is working with La Nueva Escuela, a popular organizing and education project.

Amy Goodman began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio’s New York Station, WBAI. In 1996, Amy helped launch Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! — a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 225 stations in North America. Democracy Now! is broadcast on Pacifica, community, and National Public Radio stations, public access cable television stations, satellite television, shortwave radio, and the internet. Goodman is the author, with her brother, David Goodman, of the national best-seller The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (Hyperion).

Peter Gowan is Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University and is a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review.

David Graeber is an anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago and currently employed at Yale. He is author of a number of books, including Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and the forthcoming Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire, and Direct Action: An Ethnography. As an activist he has worked with a variety of groups from the Direct Action Network and Anti-Capitalist Convergence to PGA, the IWW, and the Planetary Alternatives Network.

Margaret Gray is assistant professor of political science at Adelphi University. Gray’s work on Latino and labor politics focuses on immigration, race and ethnicity, and transnationalism. She has published academic and policy pieces. She guest edited, along with Carlos Decena, a special issue for the journal Social Text titled "The Border Next Door: New York Migraciones" (Fall 2006) about new Latinos in New York State. Gray has a decade’s experience working for nonprofits on economic justice issues.

Richard Greeman, best known for his translations of the Franco-Russian writer and revolutionary Victor Serge, has been a socialist activist in the U.S. and France since the 1950s. He has written for Socialisme ou barbarie, l’Oiseau Tempête, Le monde libertaire, Temps critiques, News & Letters, New Politics, and Z Magazine as well as for literary journals. He is affiliated with the Praxis Research and Education Center in Moscow and Secretary of the Victor Serge Foundation in France (www.victorserge.org).

Andrej Grubacic is an anarchist historian from the Balkans. He writes for ZNet. After having to leave the University of Belgrade, he moved to Fernand Braudel Center at SUNY Binghamton. His central political interest is developing "Global Balkans", an emerging  activist research, media and organizing network that works both locally and in solidarity with Balkan social movements to investigate, publicize  and impact political, social and economic struggles in the former Yugoslav and wider Balkan region.

John Gulick is an Assistant Professor in the Global Studies academic unit at Akita International University in Japan. He has also taught at universities in California, Tennessee, and China. His published work has appeared in Capitalism Nature Socialism and The Journal of World-Systems Research, among other outlets. His research explores the tension between capitalist globalization and big power rivalry, energy resource and climate change limits to continued world accumulation, and geo-economic integration in the Northeast China-Russian Far East border zone.

A. K. Gupta has been a writer and editor for The Indypendent since 2000. Gupta has written extensively about the Iraq War for The Indypendent as well as Z Magazine and Left Turn and been a frequent guest on Democracy Now! He is currently writing a book about the history of the Iraq War to be published by Haymarket Press in 2008. Gupta was previously an editor at The Guardian Newsweekly from 1989-1992.

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