Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University

Department of Sociology

Michael Bader studies how cities and neighborhoods have evolved since the height of the Civil Rights Movement. His research focuses on how residents and businesses choose to locate in particular neighborhoods and how these choices lead to racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequalities in Americans' well-being. In particular, he examines the location, causes, and health consequences of urban food deserts, neighborhoods with low accessibility to affordable nutritious food. In addition, he is developing innovative tools to measure the quality of neighborhood environments through the use of Google Street View and advanced statistical techniques. 

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Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University 

Department of African-American and African Studies

Michael R. Fisher Jr., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the political economy of race/racism in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Fisher’s areas of specialization include race, public policy, and socio-economic inequality and housing and urban redevelopment. His current book project, Black Community Building: Public Housing Reform and the Promise of an Alternative Model to Mixed-Income Neighborhoods (under contract with Georgetown University Press), reorients the debate on public housing reform by arguing that mixed-income housing creation as market-driven urban policy must be abandoned given its disparate impact on Black communities living in high-poverty neighborhoods in U.S. cities. Before his career as an educator, Dr. Fisher was a public policy advocate on Capitol Hill. His policy portfolio focused on federal social welfare programs addressing poverty. He currently serves as a founding steering committee member of the DC Legacy Project: Barry Farm-Hillsdale, a group dedicated to uplifting the Black-led struggle for land and housing in D.C.
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Assistant Professor, Bowdoin College

Department of Sociology

Greene's research broadly uses sexual communities to understand how the sociocultural and economic conditions associated with the postindustrial city shape and reconfigure how individuals conceptualize, identify to, and participate in local communities. His current book project, entitled Not in MY Gayborhood: Gay Neighborhoods and the Rise of the Vicarious Citizen, draws on ethnographic, archival, and interview data collected from iconic gay neighborhoods in Washington, DC and Chicago to develop a framework for understanding how community actors legitimate claims of ownership to a neighborhood community in the absence of residential, network, and material ties (vicarious citizenship).

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Associate Professor at Georgetown University

McCourt School of Public Policy

Bradley is a nonresident senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, a research fellow with the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and a research affiliate of both the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research. His research examines trends and sources of income volatility and intergenerational mobility within the United States, with a focus on socio-economically disadvantaged families, neighborhoods, and regions. He also conducts research on the role of anti-poverty transfer programs such as SNAP food stamps, the earned income tax credit, and TANF for improving economic well-being among low income individuals and families.

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Associate Professor, University of Maryland

Urban Studies and Planning Program

Willow Lung-Amam, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Program and Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on the link between social inequality and the built environment. She is the author of Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia (University of California Press, 2017) and has written numerous articles on the topic of immigrant suburbanization, equitable development, gentrification, suburban poverty, and the geographies of opportunity. During the 2016-2017 academic year, she was a visiting Ford Fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Center.

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Professor, American University

Department of Public Administration and Policy

William T. Jackson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Public Administration and Policy in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He is also the Founder and Former Board President for The Justice Project of South Florida (JPSFL) which aims to reduce the arrests and incarceration of youth; increase cultural competency, racial equity, and social justice; as well as promote positive interactions between law enforcement and communities of color. His research focuses on social construction, political control of the bureaucracy, and representative bureaucracy among social groups within the context of public service provision. Specifically, he is currently examining whether these theories of public policy and administration can help us understand disparities in the juvenile justice system and policing.  

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Chief Curator, Smithsonian Institution

Anacostia Community Museum

Dr. Samir Meghelli is a historian, writer, educator, and serves as Chief Curator at the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, DC. Dr. Meghelli received his B.A. (magna cum laude) from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Smithsonian Institution, he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University (Boston, MA) and the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris ("Sciences Po"; Paris, France). Dr. Meghelli is co-author of "The Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness" (2006) (with James G. Spady and H. Samy Alim) and co-editor of "New Perspectives on the History of Marcus Garvey, the U.N.I.A., and the African Diaspora" (2011).
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