Ujju Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning at The New School. Her research engages public education, urban space, rights, and the state in relation to gendered political subjectivities, kinship, racial capitalism, social reproduction, and anti-carceral studies. Her first book, Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education, a historically informed ethnography of choice as it emerged in the post-Civil Rights period in the United States, was published by the University of Minnesota Press. Her current project, Education Against Enclosure, is supported by the Spencer Foundation. Ujju also brings along history working to build organizing for educational justice, immigrants’ rights, and abolition as well as projects at the intersection of arts and social justice, popular education, and adult literacy. She serves on the Board of Teachers Unite, on the Advisory Boards of the Parent Leadership Project (Bloomingdale Family Head Start Center, PLP), PARCEO (Participatory Action-Research Center for Education, Organizing), and the The Public Scholarship Practice Space (CUNY Graduate Center).

Nicole Burrowes is a fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA) and a PhD candidate in history at the CUNY Graduate Center. During the summer of 2014, in commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Project, she co-taught a multimedia undergraduate course at UVA entitled “Freedom Summer” which included movement history, a service-learning component, a moving classroom and discussion on current issues facing black communities.She has a history of involvement with contemporary models of Freedom Schools: for ten years she worked with Sista II Sista Freedom School for Young Women of Color in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which she cofounded, and early in her career, she served as a field staff for the Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools initiative in Harlem. Her research interests include social and labor movements in the African Diaspora, intersectionality, Latin American and Caribbean history and the politics of solidarity. She recently co-authored an article for the Fall 2014 issue of Southern Quarterly entitled: “Freedom Summer and Its Legacies in the Classroom.”

Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His interests include urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history. His books include So Much Reform, So Little Change (Harvard Education Publishing Group, 2008) which examines the persistence of failure in urban schools, and a co-edited anthology, Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education For Liberation (Teachers College Press, 2008), which is concerned with education as a tool for liberation from Reconstruction through Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools.

Brian Purnell is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at Bowdoin College. He grew up in the Coney Island-Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. He lived in New York City until 2010, when he moved to Brunswick, Maine. From 2004-2010, he taught at Fordham University and directed the Bronx African American History Project, a community-university partnership dedicated to finding and preserving the history of black people in the Bronx. He is the author of, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn, which won the Dixon Ryan Fox manuscript prize from the New York State Historical Association.

In addition to his scholarship, Brian Purnell served as a scholarly advisor to “Fighting for Justice: New York Voices of the Civil Rights Movement,” an oral history project led by the New York City Commission on Human Rights. He received his M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2006) in History at New York University and his B.A. (2000) in History and African American Studies from Fordham University. His edited collection, with Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, The Strange Careers of Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South, will be out this spring.