Ari Galper is a PhD student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He is broadly interested in knowledge and expertise, professional work, social theory, philosophy of science, and qualitative methodology. His research has focused on the ways in which new technology occasions changes to knowledge, professional expertise, and interprofessional relations in healthcare settings.
Ari holds an M.S. from MIT and a B.A. from Reed College.
Nanea Renteria is a PhD student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. She is focused on Indigenous religious traditions, gender, settler colonialism, intergenerational transmission, and two-spirit dormancy and revival. Her research examines transformations in protocols within the Native American Church, a pan-Indigenous religion and way of life that has been at the center of religious freedom debates in North America for over a century. Using archival research, oral histories, and Indigenous methodologies, Nanea’s work looks at the ways in which tradition adapts, changes, and is passed on across generations.
Before coming to Columbia, Nanea presented scholarly work on settler colonialism and climate change in occupied Palestine and Cuba as part of academic solidarity delegations. She has also toured professionally as a hula dancer with the Academy of Hawaiian Arts. Nanea holds an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from the California State University, San Francisco and a B.A. in Philosophy from the California State University, Stanislaus.
Josias Agustin Mendez is a PhD student in the Department of History at Columbia University. He focuses on the spatial consequences of displacement, sovereignty, and resistance, wedding the disciplines of history and geography. Specifically, He has been studying these topics in relation to the allotment process at the turn of the twentieth century in South Dakota. His aim is to pursue research projects that use spatial analysis as a tool for understanding historical events.
Agustin holds a B. Arch. from the Spitzer School of Architecture granted by City College of New York.