James deFilippis is geographer, policy analyst and Assistant Professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University . His work and research interests range from housing and urban political economy to community development, whereas he sets value on linking disciplines and connecting academic theory and grounded political practice.
http://policy.rutgers.edu/faculty/defilippis

Publications (selection): James deFilippis, Robert Fisher, Eric Shragge: “What’s Left in the Community?“ Community Development Journal 44(1): 38-52, 2009 · Elvin  Wyly, James deFilippis: “Mapping public housing: the case of New York City“ City and Community, 2009 · James deFilippis, Susan Saegert (eds.): “The Community Development Reader“, Routledge, New York 2007 · James deFilippis: “Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital“, Routledge, New York 2004


Esther Wang is community organizer of CAAAV, Organizing Asian Communities, New York. Originally named “Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence“, CAAAV was founded in 1986 as one of the first groups in the U.S. to mobilize Asian communities to fight against anti-Asian violence. Over time, CAAAV has broadened its focus to address the wide array of needs, challenges, and injustices faced by low and no-income New York Asian communities including gentrification, worker exploitation, poverty, the detention and deportation of immigrants, and the criminalization of youth.
www.caaav.org


David Kotz is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work is amongst others on the analysis of capitalist economics, the analysis and critique of neo-liberalism and alternative models of participatory socialism. He is the Vice-President of the World Association for Political Economy.
http://people.umass.edu/dmkotz

Publications (selection): David Kotz, Terrence McDonough, Michael Reich (eds): “Contemporary Capitalism and its Crises: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory for the 21st Century“, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge / New York 2009 · David Kotz: “The Financial and Economic Crisis of 2008: A Systemic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism“, Review of Radical Political Economics 2009 · David Kotz, Fred Weir: “Russia's Path from Gorbachev to Putin: The Demise of the Soviet System and the New Russia“, Routledge, London / New York 2007 · David. M. Kotz: “Ownership, Property Rights, and Economic Performance: Theory and Practice in the USA and other Countries“, Amherst 2006


Teddy Cruz is architect and has taught and lectured in various Universities in the U.S. , Latin America , and Europe . Currently he is Associate Professor in Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California , San Diego . The practice of his 1993 founded Estudio Teddy Cruz is mainly inspired by the location at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, where two radically different cultures, societies and economies approximate each other and occupy the same geography. The outcome is a form of socially responsible and artistically motivated architecture, including community engagement, that ranges urban analysis and design proposals to built architecture, interiors, installations, public art and landscape interventions.
www.politicalequator.org

Publications / Projects (selection): Teddy Cruz: “A City Made of Waste“, The Nation 2009 · Estudio Teddy Cruz: From the Global Border to the Border Neighborhood, project 2009 · Teddy Cruz in “Indefensible Space“ (Michael Sorkin, eds, Routledge , New York 2007): “Border Tours: Strategies of Surveillance, Tactics of Encroachment.” · Teddy Cruz: “Cross-Border Suburbias“, contribution to the exhibition: Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. 2008


Peter Linebaugh, Professor of History, was a student of British labor historian E.P. Thompson, and received his Ph.D. in British history from the University of Warwick . Linebaugh currently teaches at the University of Toledo . In his work and research he specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic .
magnacartamanifesto.blogspot.com

Publications (selection): Peter Linebaugh: “The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All“ University of California Press , Berkeley 2008 · Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker: “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic“, Beacon Press, Boston 2001 · Peter Linebaugh: “The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the eighteenth Century“ Allen Laine Press, 1991


Brett Bloom is an artist and activist. He works amongst others with the Chicago-based groups Temporary Services and Department of Space and Land Reclamation. In the summer of 2008 he traveled together with a group of people in search of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor (MRCC) through Illinois and Wisconsin . They looked for the region’s counter narratives; they found evidence of small town organizing, prison resistance, and perma-cultural farming living right beside agribusiness, supermax prisons, empty factories, and Christian conservatism. They witnessed the reflections of cities, in the urban migrants seeking fairer futures on open land, in crop production that fuels and feeds the masses, and in the waste exported from cities.
http://tempserv.livejournal.com/83415.html

Publications (selection): S. Kanouse et al.: “A Call to Farms: Continental Drift through the Radical Midwest Culture Corridor“, heavy duty press, Viroqua 2008 ˙· Brett Bloom, Ava Bromberg: “Belltown Paradise, Making their own plan“, White Walls, Chicago 2004


Rob Robinson is organizer of Picture the Homeless, New York , a grassroots organization directed and led by homeless people, founded in 1999 on the principle that homeless people have civil and human rights regardless of race, creed, color or economic status. PTH is organizing for social justice around issues like housing, police violence, and the shelter-industrial complex. Their name is about challenging images, stigma, media (mis-) representation - as well as putting forward an alternative vision of community.
www.picturethehomeless.org


Veronica Dorsey is organizer of United Workers, Baltimore , a human rights organization led by low-wage workers and focused on leadership development through education, reflection and action. Founded 2002 by homeless day laborers in an abandoned firehouse-turned-shelter it has grown to a multi-racial and bilingual membership base of over 1,000 low-wage workers. In 2008 United Workers declared Baltimore 's Inner Harbor a “Human Rights Zone.“ This campaign aims to secure human rights to health care, education and work with dignity for all workers, across sectors and employers, at the Inner Harbor .
http://unitedworkers.org


Neil Smith is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, and the Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, at the Graduate Center department of the City University of New York. His research explores the broad intersections among space, nature, social theory, and history, including the analysis of American geopolitics. His urban interests include long term research on gentrification. His interests in social theory include political economy and marxism and lie behind his theoretical work on uneven development. From the global to the local scales, he argues, our spatial worlds are constructed and reconstructed as expressions of social relations and especially as expressions of capitalist social relations.
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/anthropology/fac_smith.html

Publications (selection): Neil Smith, Setha Low: “The Politics of Public Space“, Routledge , New York 2006 · Neil Smith: “American Empire: Roosevelt 's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization”, University of California Press, Berkeley 2002 · Neil Smith: “The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City “ Routledge , New York 1996 · Neil Smith: “Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space“ Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1990


Janelle Cornwell is a PhD Candidate in Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where she studies feminist economic geography under the direction of Dr. Julie Graham. Using the diverse/community economies framework, her current focus on worker co-operatives and the co-operative movement is an investigation of how co-operative subjects produce and are produced by co-operative space(s).

Julie Graham is Professor of Geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . Her work involves rethinking economy and draws on poststructuralist theory, feminism, and ongoing community-based research. Together with Katherine Gibson (geographer, The Australian National University-Canberra) she collaborates and writes under the joint name J.K. Gibson-Graham.
www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/graham

Publications (selection): J.K. Gibson-Graham: “A Postcapitalist Politics“, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2006 · J.K. Gibson-Graham: “Enabling ethical economies: cooperativism and class“ Critical Sociology 29(2): 123-61, 2003 · J.K. Gibson-Graham, S. Resnick, R.D. Wolff (eds): “Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism“, Duke University Press, Durham NC and London 2001 · Community Economies Collective: “Imagining and enacting noncapitalist futures“ Socialist Review 28 (3 +4): 93-135, 2001 · J.K. Gibson-Graham: “The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy“,  Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1996


Max Rameau is organizer of Take Back the Land, Miami , a poor people’s movement based in Miami attacking homelessness through re-housing homeless people in foreclosed houses. The group advocates for changes in governmental housing policy and was originally formed in 2006 to build the Umoja Village Shantytown on a plot of unoccupied land to protest gentrification and a lack of low-income housing. The village burned down in April 2007. Take Back the Land began squatting foreclosed properties in October 2007.
http://takebacktheland.org

Publications (selection): Max Rameau: “Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown“ Nia Press, Miami 2008.


David Harvey is marxist geographer and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he graduated from University of Cambridge with a PhD in Geography in 1961. Most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.
http://davidharvey.org

Publications (selection): David Harvey: “Introduction to Marx's Capital“, Verso, London 2009 · David Harvey: “Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development“, Verso, London 2006 · David Harvey: “A Brief History of Neoliberalism“, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005 · David Harvey: “Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference“, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1996 · David Harvey: “The Limits to Capital“, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1982