Saul Escobar Toledo was trained as an economist at UNAM in Mexico City and became one of the founding members of the PRD in 1989. Since then he has served the party in various functions, including coordinator of political economy and fiscal reform, member of the national planning committee, and PRD representative to the Federal Electoral Institute. He has published essays on labor reform and effects of globalization in Mexico and taught economics and political science at UNAM, Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Azcapotzalco, and Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Mr. Escobar Toledo speaks fluent English.

Readings available upon request

Glenda E. Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and currently the John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her new book Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights will appear in fall of 2007 from W. W. Norton & Company. Her book Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1986-1920 won Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and the Heyman Prize. She has appeared frequently on NPR and in PBS Documentaries. Gilmore has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Radcliffe at Harvard University.

Dr. Rose M. Brewer is Professor, Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor, and past chair of the African American & African Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Brewer also holds affiliated appointments in the Departments of Sociology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. She received her M.A and Ph.D degrees in Sociology from Indiana University, and did post-doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on black families, race, class and gender, and public policy, publishing over 40 refereed journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly essays in these areas. She is the editor with Lisa Albrecht of Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances. She is also co-editor of Is Academic Feminism Dead?: Theory in Practice (New York University Press, 2000), with the Social Justice Group, Center for Advanced Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota. Her most recent co-authored book is The Color of Wealth (The New Press, 2006), which was selected as one of the top l0 books for 2006, receiving the Gustavus-Meyers Book Award for best books on bigotry and human rights.

Professor Brewer’s commitment to undergraduate education and her scholarly achievements have been widely recognized. She is one of ten University of Minnesota faculty recipients of the Morse-Alumni Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence and Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. She has also received the African American Learning Resources Center Award for Teaching Excellence, among numerous other awards. In 1999 she was inducted into the National Academy of Distinguished Teachers, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Brewer has spent over a decade working on curriculum transformation and progressive pedagogy, and consults nationally on issues of race, class, and gender in the curriculum.

Rose Brewer defines herself as a scholar-activist. For over a decade, she has been a member of the board of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. She has also served on the board of United for a Fair Economy, and is a founding member of the Black Radical Congress.

Born in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan to proud members of the U.S. Communist Party, John Ross grew up in a lively cultural ambiance informed by jazz, abstract expressionist painting, radical politics, and Beat poetry – Ross was a younger member of the Beat Generation, reading his poetry in Greenwich Village bars with the great bass player Charles Mingus.

At 19, Ross set out on the road, following the Beat trail that Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg had blazed to Mexico City. Soon he had separated from this U.S.-based literary movement taking up residence in an indigenous community in the Meseta Purepcha of the state of Michoacan

Six years later when John Ross returned to the United States, he was incarcerated by the FBI at Terminal Island federal penitentiary in San Pedro California for refusal to report for induction in the U.S. Army and became the first resister to be jailed for refusing service in Vietnam. In 2005, Ross returned to San Pedro to receive the American Civil Liberties Union's annual "Uppie" (for Upton Sinclair) award for his penultimate cult classic "Murdered by Capitalism – A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left.

Following the terrible September 1985 8.2 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross returned to the city he first knew as a young Beat and took up residence in the old quarter or "Centro Historico", the ancient Aztec island of Tenochtitlan, where he lives still. Now the dean of foreign correspondents in Mexico, Ross continues to report for Noticias Aliadas (Peru), the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Texas Observer, and is a regular contributor to U.S. monthlies like the Progressive, the Nation, and Counterpunch (on line), in addition to the Mexican Left daily La Jornada. His investigations into electoral fraud and human rights abuses in Mexico, environmental carnage, and the struggles of Indians and farmers have won various awards down the years.

Since its earliest hour 12 years ago, Ross has accompanied the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, breaking the story of the impending uprising in a small northern California weekly weeks before it occurred, and writing three volumes chronicling this unique indigenous movement - "Rebellion  From the Roots" (American Book Award winner 1995), "The Annexation of Mexico" (1998), and "The War Against Oblivion" (200.) His fourth volume ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006" is to be published by Nation Books this October

Nancy MacLean (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, 1989) studies the workings of class, gender, race, and region in twentieth-century social movements and public policy. Her first book, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), was named a “noteworthy” book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, and received the Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Owsley Prize from the Southern Historical Association, and the Rosenhaupt Award from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Her most recent book is Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Harvard University Press, 2006). The recipient of an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, the book demonstrates the centrality of the fight for jobs and justice to the black freedom movement, the Mexican American civil rights movement, and the feminist movement, as it reveals new dimensions of conservative opposition to all three. Advancing a new interpretation of U.S. history over the last fifty years, it
shows how the interactions between these groups changed the country.
She is currently completing two books for course use. The Modern Women’s Movement: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, forthcoming 2007), and Debating the Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present, with Donald T. Critchlow (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming 2008). Her articles have appeared in Feminist Studies, Gender & History, In These Times, Labor, Labor History, the Journal of American History, The Nation, and the OAH Magazine of History. A recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research and Kaplan Humanities Center, she is one of the department’s several Charles Deering McCormick Professors of Teaching Excellence. MacLean also serves as co-chair of the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies.

George Friday is the National Coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network and a co-chair of United for Peace and Justice. She is a native North Carolinian where she says barbecuing, college basketball and NASCAR are required devotions. She attended UNC Chapel Hill and graduated in 1982 with BA degrees in Political Science, Economics and African American Studies. Most of her early career was spent organizing in low income white, African-American, and Native communities.

George feels strongly that her work is informed by her vision of justice and that the most effective and transformative organizing is best done in the context of relationships. This is demonstrated in her nearly 25 years of volunteer and professional efforts to bring equity to marginalized communities, build capacity among constituencies that have little experience accessing resources and garnering power for change, and assisting non-profit allies to build systems and structures to meet the growing needs of their constituencies. George has served on the boards of the Grassroots Policy Project, the Center for Voting and Democracy, the New World Foundation and the Economic Human Rights Project. She has also served on the Advisory Committee of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and is honored to serve as one of three co-chairs for United for Peace and Justice. A big music lover with a range of tastes, George enjoys southern rock and roll, punk, reggae, country, hip hop and the Grateful Dead, a band which George firmly believes is in a class of its own.

There is one reading specifically for the Thursday seminar that is available upon request.

Lois Weis is Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author and/or editor of numerous books and articles relating to race, class, gender, schooling and the economy. Her most recent volumes include Class Reunion: The Remaking of the American White Working Class (Routledge, 2004) and Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, race and gender in United States Schools (edited with Michelle Fine, SUNY Press, 2005). She sits on numerous editorial boards and is past President of the American Educational Studies Association.

    William A. Gamson is a Professor of Sociology and co-directs the Media Research and Action Project (MRAP) at Boston College. He is the author of Talking Politics (1992) and TheStrategy of Social Protest (2nd edition, 1990) among other books and articles on political discourse, the mass-media and social movements. He is a past president of the American Sociological Association.

Harriet Friedmann is Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. Her research over thirty years has explored many aspects of food and agriculture, mainly through the historical framework of “food regimes.” These include the structure of family farms, international political economy of food and agriculture, agricultural policy from local to national, regional and international, changing patterns of trade and specialization, diasporic cuisines, agronomies and food practices, and international trade rivalries and institutions. Her current research is on the politics of certification and standards both globally and locally. Globally, how do new institutions and practices use “quality” standards to contest the restructuring of transnational and local agrofood relations? Locally, how can we understand creativity in local food networks and institutions, particularly in Toronto? She was recently a Fellow of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, of All Souls College Oxford, and the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy.