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Américo Mendoza-Mori is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in literary, linguistic and cultural studies. At Harvard’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights (EMR) he researches and teaches courses on Latinx and Indigenous communities.

Mendoza-Mori’s work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, has been presented at the United Nations, and has been featured in The New York Times, a TEDx talk, BBC, NPR, Remezcla. Previously, Dr. Mendoza-Mori acted as the founding coordinator of the University of Pennsylvania’s Quechua program, co-founder of The Quechua Alliance, and co-founder of the Thinking Andean Studies international conference. Additionally, he has been involved in educational, community-based initiatives and Indigenous language reclamation projects in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and the United States.

At Harvard he is the Faculty Director of the Latinx Studies Working Group and has recently launched the Quechua Initiative on Global Indigeneity.

Farah Mallah is a PhD candidate in Education & Policy Evaluation. Her research focuses on the interplay between migration and education. This includes examining the impact of migration on education enrollment in the home country, and the impact of access to education in the host country on migrant outcomes. Prior to her doctoral studies, Farah worked as a Research Analyst in the Education and Crime Labs at the University of Chicago. Farah holds a BSc in Economics from Georgetown University and an EdM in International Education Policy from Harvard.

Gladys Aguilar is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Education—with a concentration in Human Development, Learning and Teaching—at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Drawing on her background as an immigrant from México, as well as on her professional experience as a child and family therapist and as a bilingual classroom teacher serving immigrant families, her research agenda has as a central focus the educational success and social-emotional well-being of immigrant-origin Latine children and youth.

Guided by socio-cultural ecological frameworks and drawing on diverse methods, Gladys’ work investigates Latine children’s bilingual and ethnic-racial identity development and the individual and contextual factors that inform these culturally adaptive developmental competencies. Her dissertation analyzed longitudinally the Spanish and English language development of young Mexican-origin children across the ages of 3, 4 and 5 years and examined the language features, cultural characteristics and family ethnic socialization practices of their immigrant-origin mothers that shaped this development. Through the findings of her dissertation and other projects, her research endeavors to deepen our understanding of the positive development of Latine children beginning in early childhood and elucidate the linguistic and cultural wealth of their families.

Denise Brennan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Faculty Co-Director of the Gender+ Justice Initiative at Georgetown University. Her scholarship focuses on borders, migration, climate change, trafficking, policing, and sex work. She has conducted anthropological field research with the first survivors of human trafficking to the United States, undocumented individuals and mixed-status families living inside the “100-Mile Border Zone,” and women who migrate internally to sell sex in tourist zones in the Dominican Republic. She has just begun the field research for a new book on displacement and dispossession through wildfire with migrant workers who work near the fire line as well as with migrant “disaster workers” who clean up after extreme weather events.

She is the author of Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States and What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic, both with Duke University Press. She is currently finishing a new book, The Border is Everywhere: Policing Everyday Life in An Era of Mass Deportation, and has begun the field research for a book on climate change: Life Amidst Fire: Climate Change, Migration, and Work. She has held residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Her research also has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Fulbright Program. She is an Advisor to the Best Practices Policy Project, and has been a board member of Different Avenues, and HIPS — organizations that work to protect the rights of people who engage in the sex sector. She also founded the Trafficking Survivor Leadership Training Fund that provides support for trafficking survivor-advocates.

Dr. Kongji Qin is an Assistant Professor of Language Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. As a transnational scholar trained in both China and the United States, Dr. Qin’s research centers on understanding and addressing inequality in and through language and literacy education of immigrant youth in U.S. schools. Drawing on critical race theories, gender studies, poststructuralist theories, postcolonial theories, and discourse analysis, his research is driven by questions that lie at the axes of immigration, language, pedagogy, identity, and justice. His work features three interconnected research programs: understanding the relationship between immigrant adolescents’ negotiation of racialized masculinities and language learning, preparing linguistically responsive content teachers for immigrant students, and addressing educational inequality through antiracist pedagogies and critical participatory action research (PAR) with immigrant youth.

Dr. Qin is currently leading the Immigration Literacy & Dignity Project, supported by the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. In this critical PAR project, he collaborates with both teachers and immigrant youth to explore how an intergenerational research collective of educators, students, activists and university-based researchers can support immigrant youth to engage in critical inquiry and linguistic activism to counteract xenophobia and racism.