Hannah Appel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies and Assistant Faculty Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA.

Hannah’s research and teaching focus on the daily life of capitalism, from the private sector in Africa to the relationship between financialization and household debt in the United States. Rather than assuming the scale or effects of transnational capitalist practices, Hannah takes global capitalism itself as an ethnographic object—what is it, and how could it be otherwise? In addition to publications on the global oil industry, infrastructure as an object of critical theory, and Occupy Wall Street, Hannah’s first book – The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea – explores the offshore, contracts, infrastructures, “the” economy as forms that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. These forms and processes constitute the licit life of capitalism, and they take shape within the raced and gendered histories of colonialism, empire, and white supremacy out of which capitalism emerged. Hannah is at work on a second long-term project on African owned and capitalized banks and financial institutions on the continent.

With a deep commitment to the economic imagination, the future of finance, and the power of social movements, Hannah is also a founding member and organizer of the Debt Collective. The Debt Collective works to build debtors unions through an emancipatory activation of household debt under finance capitalism: What if mass indebtedness is not simply a liability, but also a potential collective asset or leverage point in the fight to enact the new and radical economic forms we need? The Debt Collective’s first debtors’ unions has won over $1 billion dollars in debt discharge for for-profit college student debtors, and Hannah is excited to continue this line of research and action under the auspices of The Future of Finance at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA.

Learn more about Hannah Appel’s work.

Hilary Malson is an urban planning and geography scholar studying racial geographies, housing justice, and exurban development. For her dissertation, she is researching the ongoing displacement and dispersal of Black Angelenos to the Inland Empire, the Antelope Valley, and the High Desert. Her research is rooted in diaspora studies, suburban studies, Black studies, critical urban theory, and participatory planning literature, and she seeks to reconceptualize placemaking and community development through a regional-scale, diasporic lens.

As a community-engaged researcher, Hilary is committed to producing and supporting public scholarship. This has entailed: conducting research for museums and libraries, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum and the Southern California Library; writing for public audiences through Deem Journal and Monument Lab; contributing to social movements in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.; and strengthening institutional support for open access publishing through UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

At present, Hilary is a PhD student in Urban Planning at UCLA, a Graduate Student Researcher with the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, a Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow at UCLA, and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. She earned her BA in the Growth and Structure of Cities from Haverford College and her MSc in Urbanization and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Hilary proudly hails from Washington, D.C.

Veronika Zablotsky is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sawyer Seminar Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. She completed her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 2019 with emphases in Politics, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and History of Consciousness. Her research is focused on the politics of nation-state borders, migration, and forced displacement in global perspective. She is currently working on a book project that retraces the circulation of racial logics of property and dispossession between South Asia, North America, and the Middle East through a study of transregional displacement and political imaginaries in the Armenian diaspora. Her forthcoming publication “Unsanctioned Agency: Risk Profiling, Racialized Masculinity, and the Making of Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis’” analyzes how visual technologies of risk profiling on the basis of age, race, religion, and sexuality produced the figure of the “single male refugee” as a new limit-case of humanitarian discourse.

Veronika presented her scholarship at numerous conferences, most recently as a founding member of the Critical Armenian Studies Collective at the University of Pennsylvania, and has had visiting affiliations at Columbia University, CUNY, San Francisco State University, and the American University of Armenia (AUA). She also served as a Research Affiliate of the International Solidarity Action Research Network (ISARN), an autonomous network of activist scholars engaged in the study of cross-border solidarity in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. She is the recipient of several awards, including an Andrew W. Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship in 2018, a Calouste Gulbenkian Armenian Studies Scholarship in 2017, and an Excellence in Teaching Award for outstanding mentorship at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2016. As a co-founder of the Berlin-based feminist of color collective Interstice, she co-edited the German-language anthology Decolonize the City! (2017) and co-authored a number of peer-reviewed articles on racial justice in Germany, where she grew up as a first-generation immigrant. For the past decade, she has organized with abolitionist, queer of color, and migrant justice movements across Europe and North America.