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

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 UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Learn more about Hannah Appel’s work.

Justin McBride is a doctoral student in Urban Planning at UCLA. He works as a Graduate Student Researcher with the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, and with the UCLA Downtown Labor Center. Justin’s research focuses on municipal debt as an extractive process, and its effects on communities, residents, and workers of cities in urban regions. Justin also researches for and partners with worker movements, including unions and worker centers, in the Los Angeles area.

Prior to joining the Urban Planning program, Justin was as a union organizer for fifteen years, working primarily with low-wage immigrant workers in a variety of sectors, including laundries, apparel manufacturing, warehousing, janitorial services, and residential construction. His last campaign was with the Clean Carwash Campaign in the Los Angeles area, an innovative organizing effort to assist carwash workers form a union in a decentralized industry built on predation and wage theft. Clean helped workers form unions in over 40 carwashes in the LA area and beyond, and assisted workers to claim millions of dollars that employers had stolen from them.

Justin holds a Master’s degree in Urban & Regional Planning from UCLA, and Bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from Duke University. He currently serves on the boards of the Los Angeles Garment Worker Center and the Koreatown Immigrant Workers’ Alliance. He lectures in the Labor Studies program at California State University Dominguez Hills.

Vania Sciolini is the Events and Programs Manager of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. As an experienced multi-sector program manager, she has successfully run programming, events, and communications to engage diverse audiences in support of public and academic research initiatives. Prior to joining the Institute, Vania designed and managed the branding and communications strategy for the Department of English at UCLA, the largest department of its kind in the nation.

Before coming to UCLA, she supported the development of public research initiatives that centered on ethical governance while at the Berggruen Institute. Vania managed several projects that convened thought leaders, including Nobel prize winners and former heads of state, for comparative inquiry of issues facing humanity in the 21st century. Areas of focus included the ideological and biological transformation of the human and the ethical responsibilities of our unequal systems of governance. Additionally, Vania was responsible for the institute’s annual $1 million prize and accompanying 350-person gala event. She was also part of the team that expanded the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking at Stanford University.

Veronika Zablotsky is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sawyer Seminar Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. 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.