Dylan Rodríguez is a professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. He was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars in 2020 and is president of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). He recently served as the faculty-elected chair of the UCR Division of the Academic Senate (2016-2020) and as chair of Ethnic Studies (2009-2016). After completing his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 2001, Dylan spent his first 16 years at UCR in Ethnic Studies before joining Media and Cultural Studies in 2017. His research areas include: policing and carceral abolition, abolitionist movements, abolitionist praxis, carceral studies/prison studies, anti-Black and racial-colonial genocide, radical social and political thought, Black studies, and Filipino/a/x studies.

Farah Godrej is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside. Her areas of research and teaching include Indian political thought, Gandhi’s political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization and comparative political theory.  She also studies contemporary issues such as environmental justice, food politics and mass incarceration. Her research appears in journals such as Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Theory & Event, The Review of Politics, and Polity, and she is the author of "Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Her new book "Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State" (Oxford University Press, 2022) is the winner of the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award from the American Political Science Association, and received an honorable mention for the 2023 American Association of Publishers (AAP) PROSE award for scholarly excellence.