Editorial Team

Sean Crossland* (co-editor) - Utah Valley University. Sean is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Utah Valley University. Sean focuses on the public purpose of higher education in his teaching and scholarship. He earned a PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy from the University of Utah, MA in Community Leadership from Westminster College, and BA in Psychology from Iowa Wesleyan College. Sean has experience teaching undergraduate and graduate courses with community engaged learning at a community college, a research-intensive flagship university, and a liberal arts teaching college. Sean has administrative experience in community engagement and student leadership.  In his free time, Sean likes working on his house and garden and being outdoors with his wife and dog.

Rob Kleidman* - Cleveland State University. Rob Kleidman is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University, where he teaches Urban Sociology, Community Organizing and Leadership Development, and Diversity and Sport. He received an AB degree in Psychology from Cornell University, MA in Education for the University of California at Berkeley, and MA and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His engaged work and scholarship center on institution-based community organizing, regional equity organizing, and public sociology. In his role as Cleveland State’s Faculty Athletics Representative (faculty advisor to Athletics), he brings organizing methods of relationship and community building and leadership development to athletics, and plans to write on this topic. His own athletic accomplishments have been limited to schoolyard basketball while growing up in Brooklyn, New York, and intramural and pickup basketball after that.

Tobias Meier* - Koblenz University of Applied Sciences. Tobias Meier is CEO of the non-profit COD Community Organizing Deutschland gGmbH and Lecturer at Koblenz University of Applied Science (www.hs-koblenz.de). Tobias worked for several years as a community organizer in Berlin, Cologne and Duisburg and is currently responsible for the organizing team of Organizing Germany (www.communityorganizing.de). As a scholar, Tobias teaches community work, planning theory and practice and urban politics to social work and urban planning students. His research focuses mostly on history and practice of community work and urban politics. As a father of three, he likes to spend his free time with family activities.

Linda Noonan - United Lutheran Seminary, Linda Noonan teaches interfaith community organizing, public theology, and social change at United Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia where she is a PhD candidate researching the impact of race-centered, faith-based organizing on religious leaders. She is a queer United Church of Christ pastor, activist, and is engaged in the work of POWER Interfaith, a Faith in Action affiliate in Pennsylvania. Her latest publication is "Praying with Our Feet: Interfaith Rituals of Disruption and Sanctification in the Public Square" in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities, ed. Katie Day and Elise M. Edwards (Routledge, 2021).

Scott Peters - Cornell University. Scott J. Peters is a professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University.  He is also currently serving a two-year term as the Endowed Chair in Agricultural Systems at the University of Minnesota.  From 2012-2017, he served as Faculty Co-Director of a national consortium devoted to supporting publicly engaged learning and research in arts, humanities, and design fields: Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.  He currently serves as co-editor of a Cornell University Press book series, “Publicly Engaged Scholars: Identities, Purposes, and Practices.” His latest book, co-authored with Daniel J. O’Connell, is In the Struggle: Scholars and the Fight Against Industrial Agribusiness in California (New Village Press, 2021). He is currently writing a new critical history of the land-grant college and university system for Cornell University Press, titled “Land-Grant Missions: Heroic, Tragic, Prophetic.”

Alexandra Piñeros-Shields - Brandeis University. Alexandra Piñeros Shields is Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the Master of Public Policy program at the Heller School for Social Policy, Brandeis University.  Prior to teaching, she was executive director at the Essex County Community Organization (ECCO), an interfaith, interracial community organizing network. By centering people who are most affected by our systems of mass incarceration, ECCO leaders of color established immigrant sanctuary policies in four cities, the institutionalization of implicit bias trainings for an entire police department and the development of an unarmed crisis response team to respond to mental health emergencies instead of police among other successes. Dr. Piñeros Shields serves as Chair of the Board of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. She also serves on the Boards of the ACLU of Massachusetts and Philanthropy Massachusetts.

Margaret Post* (co-editor) - Clark University. Margaret Post is an Associate Research Professor at Clark University in the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice where she teaches courses on public policy, research methods, and community organizing. Her scholarship focuses on the role of grassroots community organizations in social policy change. Dr. Post’s current research investigates the prevalence and efficacy of nonprofit political organizations in the United States. Dr. Post holds a doctorate in social policy from Brandeis University and a master of public policy from the University of Minnesota. 

Lara Rusch - University of Michigan-Dearborn, Lara Rusch is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where she teaches courses in American politics, including social welfare policy, urban politics, women and the law, and community organizing. She is the current faculty director of the student leadership program WILL+. Dr. Rusch joined the faculty in 2008 after receiving her Ph.D. in Political Science at UM-Ann Arbor. Her recent research has included studies of community organizing, homeless court reform in Detroit, and the civic engagement of commuter students; she is currently most interested in democratic theory in relation to community organizing history and praxis.

Aaron Schutz* - University of Wisconsin Madison. Aaron Schutz is Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  He teaches courses in community engagement, community organizing, civil resistance, and educational theory.  He has worked with a range of local community organizing and action efforts in Milwaukee.  His research focuses on conceptual questions related to community organizing, histories of Alinsky-based organizing, and, more recently, studies of social justice organizing efforts in hypersegregated suburbs.  He is a published science fiction author and spends too much time reading fiction.  

Bernadett Sebály - Central European University. Bernadett Sebály is pursuing her Ph.D. in public policy at the Central European University (CEU) in Austria. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between movement structures and policy impact in the Hungarian housing movement, where she was a longtime organizer. Bernadett is dedicated to co-creating the history of organizing and shaping the self-representation of civil society in Eastern Europe. She is a research affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute, where she manages a resource bank of Hungarian protest events to enhance the construction of social movements’ collective memory. She received the 2022 Open Society University Network Engaged Scholar Award and was a Visiting Graduate Scholar at the P3 Lab at SNF Agora at Johns Hopkins University in 2022/2023.

Gavin Shatkin - Northeastern University. Gavin Shatkin’s research focuses on globalization, social equity, and sustainability in the rapidly urbanizing societies of Asia. His recent research includes a National Science Foundation funded project investigating the impacts of climate change-induced flooding in Southeast Asian metropolises on political debates about urban planning and policy and debates about property rights and infrastructure-induced displacement. He has previously conducted research on urban megaprojects, on planning for mega-urban regions, and on the role of community organizing and collective action in urban community development in Asian cities. His most recent book is Cities for Profit: The Real Estate Turn in Asia’s Urban Politics (Cornell, 2017). Professor Shatkin has a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs (75%) and the School of Architecture (25%).

Sara Suzuki - Tufts University. Sara Suzuki is a Senior Researcher at CIRCLE, where she works on projects that explore how organizations, institutions, and systems embedded within and across communities can support and sustain youth civic engagement in all of its forms. In particular, she focuses on how young people enact sociopolitical reflection and action (critical consciousness) to challenge systems of oppression and bring about social change. In her work, she also pursues innovation in anti-racist and anti-oppressive quantitative methodology, in particular by studying the application of QuantCrit to mixture modeling techniques. Sara serves as Chair of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Committee at Tisch College. She has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology from Boston College and a B.A. in Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis.

Amanda Tattersall* - University of Sydney. Amanda Tattersall is an Associate Professor in urban geography at the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. She has decades of experience as a scholar and practitioner, including co-founding the digital campaign group GetUp.org.au  and bringing Alinsky style community organising to Australia by founding the Sydney Alliance. She wrote Power in Coalition and is the co-author of People Power in Cities (OUP forthcoming). She currently leads Australia’s largest economic and climate transition project - the Real Deal. The Real Deal practices a community-led research method inspired by community organising, using the practices of relationality, power and uncertainty as cornerstones of collective research practice, and has played a role in leading the spread of transformational methods focused on participation across academic practice. She hosts the ChangeMakers Podcast, a popular global podcast running since 2017 that tells stories of people from across the globe trying to make the world a better place. 

Jocelyn Vicente-Angeles - Te Ohu Whakawhanaunga New Zealand. Jocelyn “Jo” Galvez Vicente-Angeles is a community organizer of the Te Ohu Whakawhanaunga, a broad-based community Alliance in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jo has more than three decades of organizing journey in solidarity with the urban and rural poor communities in the Philippines fighting for land and housing. She co-facilitated community organizing workshops in other Cities in Asia before her family migrated to Auckland in 2017. She loves watching the different hues and colors of the sky during sunrise & sunset.

*Denotes core team members