HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is Associate Professor of History in the Departments of African American Studies and History at Temple University. She is the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press: 2001) and has recently published an edited collection, Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s (Prentice Hall, 2009), as well as chapters on crime, punishment, and prison activism during the 1960s and 1970s in several edited collections. Thompson is currently writing the first comprehensive history of the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its legacy for Pantheon Books, drawing on legal, state, federal, prison, and personal records related to the Attica uprising and its aftermath (some never-before-seen).

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PAULINE LIPMAN is professor of Educational Policy Studies and Director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her teaching, research, and activism grow out of her commitment to social justice and liberation. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on race and class inequality in education, globalization, and political economy of urban education, particularly the inter-relationship of education policy, urban restructuring, and the politics of race. Pauline is the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports. Her newest book, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (Routledge, 2011), argues that education is integral to neoliberal economic and spatial urban restructuring and its class and race inequalities and exclusions as well as to the potential for a new, radically democratic economic and political social order. Her previous book, High Stakes Education and Race, Class and Power in School Restructuring, received American Education Studies Association, Critics Choice Awards. In 2011, she received the American Education Research Association Distinguished Contribution to Social Contexts in Education Research, Lifetime Achievement Award.

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RICK FANTASIA is the Barbara Richmond 1940 Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. His research has been driven by questions of labor and of culture, and their interpenetration, both in the U.S. and in France. He writes periodically for Le Monde Diplomatique and is the author of Cultures of Solidarity and co-author (with Kim Voss) of Hard Work. His recent research has concerned the symbolic economy of French gastronomy and the dynamics of its transformation as a cultural field.

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GARY SEGURA is Professor of American Politics and Chair of Chicano/a – Latino/a Studies at Stanford University, and principal and co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions™.  His work focuses on issues of political representation, and the politics to America’s growing Latino minority.  Among his most recent publications are "The Future is Ours:" Minority Politics, Political Behavior, and the Multiracial Era of American Politics, (Congressional Quarterly, 2011) and Latinos in the New Millennium: An Almanac of Opinion, Behavior, and Policy Preferences (Cambridge University Press, 2012).  Earlier work includes Latino Lives in America: Making It Home (2010, Temple University Press), “Su Casa Es Nuestra Casa: Latino Politics Research and the Development of American Political Science,” (2007), in the American Political Science Review, “Race and the Recall: Racial Polarization in the California Recall Election,” (2008) in the American Journal of Political Science, and “Hope, Tropes, and Dopes: Hispanic and White Racial Animus in the 2008 Election,” (2010) in Presidential Studies Quarterly.  Segura is one of three Principal Investigators of the 2012 American National Election Studies, is a past-President of the Midwest Political Science Association and the president-elect of the Western Political Science Association.  In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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