Chris Zepeda-Millán

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Biography:

Born and raised in the East Los Angeles barrio of Boyle Heights, Chris Zepeda-Millán was the first Chicano to receive a Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research has been published in top political science and interdisciplinary academic journals, such as the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS), Political Research Quarterly (PRQ), Politics, Groups and Identities (PGI), Critical Sociology, the Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review, Social Science Quarterly (SSQ), and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS). His first book, Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge University Press) received multiple national honors, including the prestigious Ralph J. Bunche “Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism Award” from the American Political Science Association (APSA), the “Best Book on Race and Immigration Award” from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) Section of the APSA, and the coveted “Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship  Book Award” from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements. His second book, co-authored with Sophia Wallace (University of Washington), is titled Walls, Cages, and Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era (2020), was also published by Cambridge University Press.

As a publicly engaged scholar, Professor Zepeda-Millán has been interviewed by several local, national, and international media outlets. His public intellectual work includes working with local and national community organizations, publishing op-eds in local newspapers across the country, and being an invited contributor to NBC News, Latino Decisions, the London School of Economics’ USA blog, The Progressive magazine, and The Huffington Post. Professor Zepeda-Millan has also been involved in various social movements related to environmental and global justice, labor, student, immigrant, and indigenous rights.

Prior to joining the Departments of Public Policy and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA, Professor Zepeda-Millán was a Provost Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, as well as a faculty member at Loyola Marymount University and UC Berkeley, where he chaired the Center for Research on Social Change. He is currently the chair of UCLA’s Labor Studies Program as well as the founder and faculty director of the UCLA Strategic Research Lab.

Courses:

Immigration Policy
 Labor Organizing

Unions in American Politics
 Social Movements
 Racial Politics

Latinx Labor

Latino Politics
 Interdisciplinary Research Methods

Books:

Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge University Press 2017)

Walls, Cage & Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era (Cambridge University Press 2020)

 

Selected Articles & Book Chapters:

“The U.S. Immigrant Rights Movement.” With Ramon Garibaldo Valdez. Contemporary Social Movements. Eds. Doug McAdam, David Snow, and Dana Moss (Wiley Blackwell 2026).

 

“Contesting Borders in the ‘Age of Migration’: Progressive Border Activism in the U.S. & Europe.”

With Elias Steinhilper and Moritz Sommer. Handbook on Progressive Politics. Ed. Alice Mattoni (Elgar Publishing 2025).

 

“Do Latinos Still Support Immigrant Rights Activism? Examining Latino Attitudes a Decade After the 2006 Protest Wave.”

With Sophia Wallace. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS). Vol. 46 (4): 770-790, 2020.

 

“Mobilizing for Immigrant Rights Under Trump.”

With Sophia Wallace. The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement. Eds. David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow (Oxford University Press 2018).

 

“The Political Effects of Having Undocumented Parents: How Parental Illegality Impacts the Political Behavior of their U.S.-Born Children.”

With Alex Street and Michael Jones-Correa. Political Research Quarterly. Vol. 70 (4): 818-832, 2017.

 

“The Impact of Large-Scale Collective Action on Latino Perceptions of Commonality and Competition with African-Americans.”

With Michael Jones-Correa and Sophia Wallace. Social Science Quarterly (SSQ), Vol. 97 (2): 458-475, 2016.

 

“Weapons of the (Not So) Weak: Immigrant Mass Mobilization in the U.S. South.”

Critical Sociology, Vol. 42 (2): 269-287, 2016.

 

“Mass Deportation and the Future of Latino Partisanship.”

With Alex Street and Michael Jones-Correa. Social Science Quarterly (SSQ), Vol. 96 (2): 540-552, 2015.

 

“Perceptions of Threat, Demographic Diversity, and the Framing of Illegality: Explaining (non)Participation in New York’s 2006 Immigrant Protests.”

Political Research Quarterly (PRQ), 67(4): 880-888, 2014.

 

“Triangulation in Social Movement Research.”

With Phil M. Ayoub and Sophia J. Wallace. Methodological Practices In Social Movement Research. Donatella della Porta (Ed.), Oxford University Press, 2014. 

 

“Spatial and Temporal Proximity:  Examining the Effects of the 2006 Immigrant Rights Marches on Political Attitudes.”

With Sophia Wallace and Michael Jones-Correa. American Journal of Political Science (AJPS), 58(2): 433-448, 2014.

 

“Racialization in Times of Contention:  How Social Movements Influence Latino Racial Identity.”

With Sophia Wallace. Politics, Groups, and Identities (PGI), 1(4): 510-527, 2013. 

 

Emily Weisburst

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I am an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. My research focuses on topics in labor economics and public finance, including criminal justice and education.

I recently earned my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. While in graduate school, I worked as a Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President and as a research associate for the RAND Corporation on joint projects with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. I have also received the NAED Spencer Dissertation Fellowship to support my research on the impact of funding for police in public schools on student disciplinary outcomes and educational attainment in Texas.

My research interests include understanding factors that impact police decision-making and public trust in police. I am also interested in how interactions with the criminal justice system affect individuals, families and communities. A recent paper examines how much police discretion matters to law enforcement outcomes, after accounting for offense context. In this project, I find that the likelihood that an incident results in an arrest critically depends on the officer that shows up to respond to an offense reported through a police call for service.

For more information about my work, check out my website: emilyweisburst.com

Martin Gilens

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Martin Gilens is a Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Social Welfare at UCLA. His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Professor Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America and Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, and coauthor (with Benjamin I. Page) of Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It. He has published widely on political inequality, mass media, race, gender, and welfare politics. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Professor Gilens is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and taught at Yale and Princeton universities before joining the Luskin School at UCLA in 2018.

Read more about Professor Gilens’ work:

 

Kenya L. Covington

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Kenya L. Covington conducts empirical research that examines social and economic inequality associated with the structural makeup of metropolitan areas. Her work suggests ways to better utilize social and urban policies that likely mitigate disparities in economic opportunity and well-being overall.

For over a decade she was professor of urban studies and planning at California State University Northridge and concluded her tenure as full professor. In 2015 she was named Distinguished Teacher of the Year.

Professor Covington teaches courses on Housing Policy, Introduction to Public Policy, Research Methods, Forces of Urbanization, Social Inequality and Urban Poverty. She joined the Public Policy faculty at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs in 2017. 

Dr. Covington actively participates in APPAM, Urban Affairs, ACSP and the Population Association of America. Over her career, Dr. Covington’s articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban Studies, Brookings Institution Policy Briefs, Journal of Urban Affairs, the International Journal on Economic Development, the Harvard Journal on Legislation, the National Urban League’s 2003 and 2004 publication titled The State of Black America, and The Review of Black Political Economy, among other publications.

Kian Goh

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Kian Goh is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She researches the relationships between urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the context of climate change and global urbanization. Dr. Goh’s current research investigates the spatial politics of urban climate change responses, with fieldwork sites in cities in North America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. More broadly, her research interests include urban theory, urban design, environmental planning, and urban political ecology. As a professional architect, she cofounded design firm SUPER-INTERESTING! and has practiced with Weiss/Manfredi and MVRDV. She previously taught at Northeastern University, the University of Pennsylvania, the New School, and Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Goh received a PhD in Urban and Environmental Planning from MIT, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University.

Dr. Goh’s forthcoming book, Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice, will be published by the MIT Press in 2021. The book investigates the contested power relationships and conflicts around plans proposed by cities to respond to climate change impacts. Exploring sites in New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam, it traces the global flows of ideas and influence in the production and justification of climate change plans, and the local social movements organized against unjust and exclusionary actions.

Recent publications include articles on urban theory and climate justice in Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, urban planning and the Green New Deal in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the politics of urban flooding in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, the global and urban networks of climate change adaptation in Urban Studies, and queer space and activism in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Michael Manville

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Michael Manville is Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. His research areas are transportation, land use, and housing, and the interrelationships between those. He has particular interests in road and parking pricing; the determinants of driving and transit use; and the influence of land use regulations on the supply and price of housing.

Dr. Manville’s research has been published in journals of planning, economics, urban studies, and sociology. He has received research funding from University Transportation Centers, from the John Randolph Haynes Foundation, and the TransitCenter, among others. He has consulted for developers, environmental groups, local governments, and the United Nations.

Dr. Manville has an MA and PhD in Urban Planning, both from UCLA Luskin. Prior to joining Luskin as a faculty member, he was Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University.

Selected Publications

Manville, Michael, Mott Smith and Shane Phillips. 2025. The Consequences of Measure ULA: Some Clarifications. UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. August.

Manville, Michael and Mott Smith. 2025.  The Unintended Consequences of Measure ULA. UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. April.

Manville, Michael, Hannah King, Juan Matute and Theodore Lau. 2024. Neighborhood Change and Transit Ridership. Journal of Transport Geography. 121.

Manville, Michael. 2024. Induced Travel Estimation Revisited.  Report to the Southern California Association of Governments.

Monkkonen, Paavo, Michael Manville and Michael Lens. 2024. Built out Cities? A new approach to Measuring Land Use Regulation. Journal of Housing Economics. 63.

Manville, Michael, Paavo Monkkonen, Nolan Gray and Shane Phillips. 2024. Does Discretion Delay Development? Journal of the American Planning Association. 89(3): 336-347.

Manville, Michael, Paavo Monkkonen, Michael Lens and Richard Green. 2022. Renter Nonpayment and Landlord Response: Evidence from COVID-19.  Housing Policy Debate. 33:6, 1333-13.

Manville, Michael, Gregory Pierce and Bryan Graveline. Guardrails on Priced Lanes: Protecting Equity While PromotingEfficiency. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

Manville, Michael, Brian Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg, and Andrew Schouten. 2022. Vehicle Access and Falling TransitRidership: Evidence from Southern California. Transportation. 50, 303–329.

Manville, Michael and Miriam Pinski. 2021. The Causes and Consequences of Curb ParkingManagement. Transportation Research Part A. 152 (October): 295-307.

Manville, Michael.  2021. Liberals andHousing: A Study in Ambivalence. Housing Policy Debate. 33:4, 844-864.

Manville, Michael and Paavo Monkkonen. 2021. Unwanted Housing: Localism and the Politics of Development. Journal of Planning Education and Research. 44(2):685-700.

Gabbe, CJ, Michael Manville and Taner Osman. 2021. The Opportunity Cost of Parking Requirements. Journal of Transport and Land Use. 14(1):277-301

Manville, Michael. 2020. Roads, Pricesand Shortages: A Gasoline Parable. UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies Explanatory Essay. October 1.

Manville, Michael, Paavo Monkkonen, and Michael Lens. 2020. It’s Time to End Single Family Zoning. Journal of the American Planning Association. 86 (1); 106-112.

Manville, Michael. 2021. Value Capture Reconsidered. UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. June 17.

King, David, Michael Smart and Michael Manville. 2019. The Poverty of the Carless: Toward Universal Auto Access. Journal of Planning Education and Research. 42(3):464-481.

Manville, Michael and Emily Goldman. 2017.  Would Congestion Pricing Harm the Poor? Do Free Roads Help the Poor? Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Manville, Michael and Taner Osman. 2017. Motivations for Growth Revolts: Discretion and Pretext. City and Community. 16(1):66-85.

Manville, Michael. 2017. Travel and the Built Environment: Time for Change. Journal of the American Planning Association. 83(1): 29-32.

Manville, Michael. 2017. Bundled Parking and Vehicle Ownership: Evidence from the American Housing Survey. Journal of Transport and Land Use. 10(1): 27–55

Darin Christensen

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Darin Christensen is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his Ph.D. in political science and M.A. in economics from Stanford University.

Darin studies political economy, focusing on institutions and policies that promote investment and mitigate social conflict in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. He has consulted on projects for The Asia Foundation, USAID, and The World Bank.

Darin is a co-founder of the Project on Resources and Governance (PRG) and an affiliate of several academic centers, including the California Center for Population Research, Center for Effective Global Action, Evidence in Governance and Politics, and UCLA’s African Studies Center.

More information about his research and teaching can be found at darinchristensen.com.

Ananya Roy

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Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Working in alliance with social movements and community organizations, the Institute seeks to build power and abolish structures of inequality. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Master’s in City Planning (1994) and Ph.D. in Urban Planning (1999). There she was the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching recognition that the University of California, Berkeley bestows on its faculty.  In 2011, Ananya received the Excellence in Achievement award of the Cal Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement award which recognizes her contributions to the University of California and public sphere.

Ananya is a scholar of global racial capitalism and postcolonial development whose research is concerned with the political economy and politics of dispossession and displacement. With theoretical commitments to postcolonial studies, Black studies, and feminist theory, she seeks to shift conceptual frameworks and methodologies in urban studies to take account of the colonial-racial logics that structure space and place. As a researcher, Ananya strives to advance research justice, by which she means accountability to communities directly impacted by state-organized violence. At the very heart of her work is an insistence on the transformation of the public university – through teaching, public scholarship, and community engagement – so that it can be a force for social justice.

Ananya’s books have focused on urban transformations and land grabs in the global South as well as on global structures of finance and development capital. They include City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty; Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South, Asia, and Latin America; Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global; Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South; and Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. Ananya is the recipient of several awards including the Paul Davidoff book award, which recognizes scholarship that advances social justice, for Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development.

Ananya’s most recent book is Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion, which builds on a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism. Thinking across Europe and the United States, this work is concerned with the place of racial others in the liberal democracies of the West. At a time of resurgent white nationalism, Beyond Sanctuary foregrounds migrant movements and their imaginations and practices of abolition and decolonization.

Housing justice has been at the center of Ananya’s work for many years now. She led a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, which created a global field of inquiry into housing justice shared by university and movement scholars. Her ongoing scholarship, organized in the form of insurgent research collectives, is concerned with the liberal governance of mass homelessness and has been supported by research foundations such as the Russell Sage Foundation. From Echo Park Lake to Aetna Street, such work centers encampment geographies and poor people’s histories. Ananya is currently working on a monograph on racial banishment, the expulsion and social death of working-class communities of color through racialized policing and other forms of dispossession.

Ananya was Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from 2016 to 2020. She is a 2020 Freedom Scholar, an award bestowed by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation to scholars who advance social and racial justice. In 2022, Ananya was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Geneva. Along with Robin D.G. Kelley, she currently leads a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning endeavor titled Housing the Third Reconstruction.

Website: https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/ananya-roy/

Michael A. Stoll

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Michael A. Stoll is Professor of Public Policy in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He serves as a Fellow at the American Institutes for Research, the Brookings Institution, the Institute for Research on Poverty at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and served as a past Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Dr. Stoll’s published work explores questions of poverty, labor markets, migration, and crime. His past work includes an examination of the labor market difficulties of less-skilled workers, in particular the role that racial residential segregation, job location patterns, job skill demands, employer discrimination, job competition, transportation, job information and criminal records play in limiting employment opportunities.

His recent work examines the labor market consequences of mass incarceration and the benefits and costs of the prison boom. A recently completed book, Why Are so Many Americans in Prison, explores the causes of the American prison boom and what to do about it to insure both low crime and incarceration rates.

Much of his work has been featured in a variety of media outlets including NPR, PBS, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Economist, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, Univision, among other outlets.  He also regularly advises the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Labor, as well as for state and local governments in various capacities.

Prof. Stoll received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley.

RECENT BOOKS

 

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Why are So Many Americans in Prison? jointly authored with Steven Raphael, New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013.

Do Prisons Make Us Safer? The Benefits and Costs of the Prison Boom
edited with Steven Raphael, New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009

Barriers to Reentry? The Labor Market for Released Prisoners in Post-Industrial America edited with David Weiman and Shawn Bushway, New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007 (Selected as a Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations by Princeton University’s Industrial Relations Section.)