Hajar Yazdiha is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and faculty affiliate of the USC Equity Research Institute, USC Black Studies Center, and the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights. She is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and is a former Racial Justice Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights, Global Scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Ford Fellow. Hajar researches the politics of belonging through collective memory and social movements, examining the forces that bring us together and keep us apart as we work to forge collective futures. She is the author of the book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement with Princeton University Press, an honorable mention for the MSA’s First Book Award.

Yagmur Karakaya is an Assistant Professor at Yale University and the Associate Director for the Center for Cultural Sociology. She received her PhD from the University of Minnesota’s Sociology Department in 2020. Her work focuses on political culture broadly. Specifically, she studies nostalgia as a collective force, highlighting its central place within both populist political discourse and popular culture. In her award-winning article in the American Journal of Cultural
Sociology (2020), she argues that state-led populist nostalgia mobilizes both emotions and reflexive cognition to shape political engagement. Her work has also appeared in Social Forces, Poetics, New Perspectives on Turkey, and Sociological Forum. Her book, Populist Nostalgia: Yearning for the Ottoman Past in Turkey, is under contract with University of California Press. She is spending her sabbatical year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Sabancı University in Turkey. Her next project examines therapy in authoritarian political contexts.

Christina Simko is Associate Professor and Chair of the Anthropology and Sociology department at Williams College. Her research focuses on violent pasts and the complexities that they create for identity and narrative. Simko is the author of The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11 (Oxford, 2015). Her work has also examined the legacies of the 1945 atomic bombings, the Equal Justice Initiatives Legacy Sites in Alabama, USA, and ongoing debates about the future of Confederate monuments in the United States. Simko’s next book, The Reverberating Past, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Chana Teeger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics. Her research broadly examines how people understand the causes of—and potential remedies for—social inequality. It has appeared in journals such as the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, and Sociology of Education. Her multi-award-winning book, Distancing the Past: Racism as History in South African Schools (Columbia University Press), documents how young South Africans, born into democracy, confront their country’s apartheid past in high
school history lessons