Emirbayer, Mustafa: - Mustafa Emirbayer is professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A past chair of the ASA Theory Section and winner of the Lewis Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda-Setting in Sociology, Emirbayer's research includes historical studies on the teaching of morality and citizenship in American public schools and theoretical studies on race, social networks, culture, agency, collective emotions, the public sphere and civil society, revolutions and social movements, organizations, and democracy. He is the co-author (with Matthew Desmond) of The Racial Order (2015).

Desmond, Matthew: - Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of five books, including Poverty, by America (2023) and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond's research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of "fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.