Ben Agger passed away suddenly in July 2015. He was a ground-breaking scholar of critical theory, cultural/media/internet studies, and critical food and exercise studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he was Professor of Sociology. He directed the Center for Theory there, and edited the journal Fast Capitalism. One of his recent books is Texting Toward Utopia: Kids, Writing, and Resistance (2013).
Pamela Aronson is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her current research examines how nontraditional students experience college, the challenges of graduating from college during a time of recession, young men’s and women’s career development, young women’s work and family lives, and gender consciousness. She has studied the transition to adulthood, work and family orientations, and attitudes toward feminism. She has over two dozen publications, appearing in such places as Gender & Society, Journal of Youth Studies, and Advances in Life Course Research.
Jessica Brathwaite earned her doctorate in Sociology from Temple University in 2015. Her research interests include inequality, education reform, and education policy. Her goal is to better understand the mechanisms by which education policy can reproduce or reduce inequality.
Karen M. Cardozo is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, MA. She coordinates programs in Leadership Studies and Women’s Studies, and is currently working to apply intersectional analysis to labor, leadership and higher education studies. Her prior work in cultural and meta-professional studies has been published in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Modern Language Studies, American Studies, and Pedagogy.
Pamela Davies is Principal Lecturer and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University, UK. Her research interests cluster around gender, crime and victimization, and her various publications reflect this. Her most recent research focuses on invisible crimes and social harms and includes approaches to reducing interpersonal violence and domestic abuse. She is currently writing about sexual abuse in the British army (with Dr Tanya Wyatt) and on the theorizing of child sexual abuse.
William Jefferies completed his doctorate, ‘From the Centrally Planned Economy to Capitalist Globalisation: How Economists Underestimated the Growth of the World Market’, in January 2014 at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School. It is the first systematic history of the application of western national income measurements to the centrally planned economies. It shows how the imputation of value to central plan by official Soviet and Western agencies meant that the collapse of physical output and the growth of the market economy were underestimated with the transition of these economies to capitalism. It was published as Measuring National Income in the Centrally Planned Economies: Why the West Underestimated the Transition to Capitalism (Routledge, London). It further provides interesting insights into the value debate as exemplified by Sraffa among others.
Michael J. Lynch is a Professor in the Department of Criminology and associated faculty member in the Patel School of Global Sustainability at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on green criminological issues, radical criminology, corporate crime, and racial biases in criminal justice processes. His recent books include: Radical and Marxist Criminology (with P.B. Stretesky, 2011); The Treadmill of Crime: Political Economy and Green Criminology (with P.B. Stretesky and M.A. Long, 2013); Exploring Green Criminology: Toward a Green Revolution in Criminology (with P.B. Stretesky, 2014); and Environmental Law, Crime and Justice (with R.G. Burns and P.B. Stretesky, 2014).
Alexander J. Means is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Psychological Foundations of Education at SUNY Buffalo State. His research examines educational policy and governance in relation to political economy, urbanization, human security, social inequality, and radical democratic theory and politics. He is the author of Schooling in the Age of Austerity: Urban Education and the struggle for Democratic Life (Palgrave, 2013), which won a 2014 Society of the Professors of Education Book Award, and Toward a New Common School Movement (Paradigm, 2014) with Noah De Lissovoy and Kenneth Saltman. His work has also been published in numerous international research journals.
Julien Mercille is Associate Professor at the School of Geography at University College Dublin, Ireland. He wishes to acknowledge the Leverhulme Trust for providing an international networking grant (Framing Financial Crisis and Protest: North-West and South-East Europe), which supported some of the research in this paper.
Gary Mongiovi teaches at St John’s University. He received his PhD from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in 1988. His writings have appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Social Research, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Metroeconomica, the Review of Radical Political Economics, and The Nation.
Enda Murphy is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has published extensively on the financial crisis, urban planning and noise pollution. His current research interests centre on political economy, neoliberalism, economic crises and crisis resolution.
Beth Anne Shelton is Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington. She has published extensively on women’s time use, including time spent on household labor and volunteer activities. Recent publications include ‘Are Stay-at-Home Mothers Really at Home?: U.S. Mothers’ Volunteer Work in Schools’ (with Rebecca Deen, 2014) and Fast Families, Virtual Children: A Critical Sociology of Families and Schooling (with Ben Agger, 2007).
