The SAN Advisory Board is composed of individuals with interest and experience in creating connections between disciplinary knowledge and skills and the needs of communities and not-for-profit organizations.
Rebecca London, University of California, Santa Cruz [CHAIR]
Rebecca A. London is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the ways that communities, educational institutions, and community organizations support young people to be healthy and successful. She advocates for and utilizes a community-engaged research approach to co-construct research and knowledge with those who can benefit the most from the research. Her work focuses on both policy and practice, and uses qualitative and quantitative methods. She has conducted research in multiple fields, including K–12 and postsecondary education, cross-sector approaches to “whole student” development, health and wellness, afterschool programs, and social welfare programs. London is author of Rethinking Recess: Creating Safe and Healthy Playtime for All Children in School (2019) and co-editor of From Data to Action: A Community Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes (with Milbrey McLaughlin, 2013). Her recent work has been published in journals such as the Teaching Sociology, Journal of School Health, Educational Researcher, and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Carol Glasser, Minnesota State University – Mankato
Carol Glasser is an associate professor of sociology at Minnesota State University – Mankato. Her teaching and research areas address social movements, human-animal animal studies, public sociology, and community engaged research. Glasser is a public sociologist who bridges her academic skillset with community needs. In her teaching, research, consulting, and activism, she is committed to bridging research and academic support to social justice issues to make the work of campaigns, activists, and organizations more effective.
Maria Krysan, University of Illinois Chicago
Maria Krysan is an LAS Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Professor Krysan has spent decades teaching, researching, and writing about residential segregation and racial attitudes. Her 2017 award-winning book with Kyle Crowder, Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification draws on in-depth interviews, large-scale survey data, and previously published research to propose an innovative framework for understanding the causes of racial residential segregation. This book served as a springboard for Krysan’s growing engaged work. For this, she has been inspired by, and fortunate to partner with, Tonika Lewis Johnson, a Chicago social justice artist and creator of the Folded Map Project.
Krysan’s writing has been published in conventional academic outlets as well as nonacademic publications such as The Hill Reporter, Crain’s Chicago Business, Visible Magazine, and Block Club Chicago. She has been interviewed by and/or cited in such media as WBEZ (Chicago’s NPR station), Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, Newsweek, CityLab, Houston Chronicle, CNN, WGN, TeenVogue, Vox.Com, Washington Post, New York Times, and the L.A. Times. She also frequently presents her work outside of academia, both sharing her expertise with, and learning from, conversations with and presentations to advocates, mayors, legislators, housing agencies, real estate agents, researchers, K-12/college students, foundation staff, lawyers, library patrons, and so on.
Tom Medvetz, University of California, San Diego
Tom Medvetz is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His research sits at the overlap between the studies of knowledge, politics, and culture. Concretely, his work focuses on topics like the changing nature of expertise; the uses of social scientific knowledge in civic-political debate; and the dynamics of artistic and cultural appreciation. His book Think Tanks in America (2012) considers the rise of public policy research institutes (or “think tanks”) in the US and their impact on civic-political debate. Medvetz is also the co-editor of two books in the Oxford Handbooks series—the Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (2018, with Jeffrey Sallaz) and the Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics (2023, with Gil Eyal). He has disseminated his work in public forums like the Washington Post.
Nancy Plankey-Videla, Texas A&M University
Dr. Plankey-Videla is associate professor of sociology, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Law, coordinator of the Latino/a and Mexican American Studies Program, and affiliated with the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Texas A&M University. Born in Chile and raised in Vermont and central Mexico, her research and teaching is informed by a global perspective on inequality and agency. Her research seeks to understand how structural inequality affects opportunities and barriers for women workers in Latin America and Latinx immigrants in the U.S. Her award-winning book, We Are in This Dance Together: Gender, Power and Globalization in A Mexican Garment Firm (2012) links power shifts in the global economy with firm-level organizational changes, and how these affect women worker’s mobilization. More recently, Dr. Plankey-Videla’s community engaged research with the Latinx immigrant community in Texas focuses on wage theft and the racialization of day laborers, effects of deportation threat on families and communities, and social integration of deportees and returnees in Mexico. Her research informs her activism with undocumented students on campus and the local non-profit Brazos Interfaith Immigration Network, of which she is a founding member and current Board Chair.
Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts Boston
Mark R. Warren is professor of public policy and public affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a sociologist and community engaged scholar who studies and works with community, parent and youth organizing groups seeking to promote racial equity, educational justice, and community liberation. Mark is the author of six books, most recently Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Mark has co-founded several networks promoting activist scholarship, community organizing, and education justice, including the People’s Think Tank on Educational Justice, the Urban Research Based Action Network, and the Special Interest Group on Community and Youth Organizing in the American Educational Research Association. He has won a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. He is married to Roberta Udoh, a pre-K teacher in Boston Public Schools, and together they have raised two beautiful daughters. You can learn more about Mark at www.Mark-Warren.org.
