Jordan Corson, Conference Organizer, Associate Professor, School of Education and MA in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University

Ryan Conrad, Adjunct Research Professor at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation, Carleton University

Karma R. Chávez, Chair and Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas

Jamila Hammami, Community Organizer, Writer, Resistance Archivist, and Public Border Abolitionist Scholar-Activist

This panel will explore education on many sides of borders. Whether abolitionist study about prisons or study groups in prisons, explorations of immigrant detention systems, or solidarity across borders, this session thinks against the carceral logics that aim to restrict people’s physical, intellectual, and linguistic movements. Instead, a collective practice of learning takes shape that will resist institutional frameworks and seek out freer movement, expression, and ways of being.

Siobhan McGuirk, Researcher, Educator, and Journalist, Red Pepper

Reem Rosenhaj, Founding member of Freedom Side School (an abolitionist elementary school in Philadelphia), Community Organizer and Educator

John Washington, Translator, Author, and Reporter, Lookout and Lit & Border News

Through sanctuary schools, networks of collective care, and sumud, the work of abolitionist education is grounded in places. This panel will look at school models, nonformal learning environments, and curricular projects that cultivate sanctuary and resistance. Participants will share examples of educational praxis that centers lived experiences and community-based work.

Molly Hamm-Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education, University of South Florida

Ahmed Kamal Junina, Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, Head of English Department, Al-Aqsa University

Rita Kamani-Renedo, PhD Candidate in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education and Curriculum and Teacher Education, Stanford

Chandler Miranda, Assistant Professor of Education, Molloy University 

Solidarity is built across borders and in opposition to ongoing structural and state violence. Panelists in this session will share collective projects that imagine how accompaniment, care, and community knowledge contest the violence of borders.

Sophia Angeles, Assistant Professor of Multilingual Education for the College of Education, Penn State University

Melissa Adams Corral, Assistant Professor of Teaching and Learning, University of Texas

Sarah Gallo, Associate Professor of Language Education and Urban Social Justice Education, Rutgers University

Kyle Halle-Erby, Postdoctoral Scholar, UCLA School of Education & Information Studies

Claudia Triana, Doctoral Candidate in Education Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin

Following the concept of routes and roots, border abolition entails the right to move and the right to stay. This panel explores how people study against the colonial force of gentrification, build educational spaces that reflect communities, and construct sites of learning grounded in abolitionist care.

Ujju Aggarwal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The New School

Conor “Coco” Tomas Reed, Editor, LÁPIZ Journal, Lost & Found:The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative

Tizoc Sanchez, Educator, Anthropologist

Silky Shah, Executive Director, Detention Watch Network

Melissa Adams Corral
Assistant Professor of Teaching and Learning, University of Texas

Melissa Adams Corral is an assistant professor of Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas – Río Grande Valley. Her research extends her organizing work as a bilingual elementary school teacher to develop people-centered methodologies and improve the educational experiences of children from multilingual communities.

Ujju Aggarwal
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The New School

Ujju Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School. Aggarwal's research tracks education as a practice of freedom and as a site of containment, engaging questions of public infrastructures, governance, urban space, gender, and race. Her first book, Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) is a recipient of the American Education Studies Association Critics’ Choice Book Award (2025). Ujju brings a long history of working to build women of color-led organizing for educational justice, immigrants’ rights, and abolition. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Parent Leadership Project (Bloomingdale Head Start Center), the Public Scholarship Practice Space (CUNY Graduate Center), and PARCEO.

Sophia Ángeles
Assistant Professor of Multilingual Education for the College of Education, Penn State University

Sophia L. Ángeles is an Assistant Professor of Multilingual Education for the College of Education at Penn State University. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Stemming from her experiences as a former educator working in multilingual and immigrant communities, Dr. Ángeles’ interrogates how and why language programs are designed in ways that translate into differential access to college and career readiness opportunities for high school newcomer youth. Her scholarship also accounts for how newcomer youth’s educational trajectories are shaped by immigration policies and their identities as minoritized youth.

Karma R. Chávez 
Chair and  Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas 

Karma R. Chávez is Chair and Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. She is author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019); and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021). She is a cofounder of her campus Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and president of her campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors. 

Ryan Conrad
Adjunct Research Professor at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation, Carleton University

Ryan Conrad is an Adjunct Research Professor at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is the co-founder of Against Equality, a digital archive and publishing collective based in the United States and Canada, and is the editor of the collective's anthology Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion (2014). He also currently serves as the president of the part-time faculty union at his university and is an active member of the Faculty for Palestine-Ottawa chapter.

Jordan Corson
Conference Organizer, Associate Professor, School of Education and MA in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University

Jordan Corson is a professor and organizer living in Philadelphia. He is the author of several books, including Reconceptualizing Immigration for Newcomer Students (Teachers College Press, 2023) and TV as Curriculum Studies (co-authored with his bestie, Dani Friedrich). Outside (and often against) academia, Jordan is active in border abolition and Palestine solidarity organizing. Jordan believes that All Cats Are Beautiful, but his cats Red Emma and Olive are the best.

Jamie Csimbok
Conference Assistant, MA student in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University

Jamie Csimbok is an MA student in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies (MAHG) Program at Stockton University. She currently works as a Production Coordinator for the William Morrow and Avon imprints at HarperCollins Publishers. Her thesis research centers around analyzing overt and implicit Zionist narrative bias in historical fiction and how Palestinians are subjugated to the background in the story of Palestinian land in the Western perspective. Her research interests further include how the memory relayed through fiction impacts historical narratives and contemporary memory. She will also tell anyone who will listen about Romania’s changing political sphere in the twentieth century.

Sarah Gallo
Associate Professor of Language Education and Urban Social Justice Education, Rutgers University

Sarah Gallo is an associate professor of Language Education and Urban Social Justice Education at Rutgers University. Her research has brought attention to the ways that undocumentedness shapes the educational and languaging lives of elementary school-aged children, their families, and their teachers in Mexico and the United States. 

Kyle Halle-Erby
Postdoctoral Scholar, UCLA School of Education & Information Studies

Kyle Halle-Erby, PhD, is a postdoctoral scholar in the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies. A former high school teacher, Kyle works with immigrant students, teachers, and administrators to study language policy and planning using critical Black and Indigenous frameworks. 

Jamila Hammami
Community Organizer, Writer, Resistance Archivist, and Public Border Abolitionist Scholar-Activist

Jamila Hammami is a cross-movement grassroots organizer, writer, resistance archivist, and public border abolitionist scholar-activist. A Frederick Douglass Bicentennial 200 Abolitionist honoree, Hammami specializes in Border and Carceral Studies and Community Organizing and Movements. They serve as a movement and communications strategist fighting deportations and defending dissent, and currently act as a strategist and organizer for Deportation Defense Campaigns (DDCs) in New York State. Hammami is a co-founder and collective member of the Liberation Movement Lab, a digital movement school dedicated to expanding community access to Popular and Movement Education beyond traditional U.S. neoliberal frameworks. Additionally, Hammami is a co-founder, co-host, and collective member of the Resistant Communiqués Podcast, a digital repository documenting People's and Resistance History. Recent publications by Hammami include contributions to Radical History Review (Duke Press, 2023), Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands (University of Arizona Press, 2024), and a forthcoming piece in Decolonial Dispatches by Sociologists for Palestine (2026).

Molly Hamm-Rodríguez
Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education, University of South Florida

Molly Hamm-Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of South Florida. She specializes in anthropology of education and comparative and international education with a regional focus on the Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic communities in the U.S. Her research explores the relationships between language, racialization, social class, gender, immigration status, labor, and schooling in school-to-work and college and career readiness programs. She also researches multilingualism within in- and out-of-school contexts as children and youth negotiate learning and their livelihoods. Her work has been published in journals including Anthropology & Education Quarterly; Applied Linguistics; archipelagos: A journal of Caribbean digital praxis; CENTRO: Journal for Puerto Rican Studies; Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy; Language Awareness; Learning, Culture, and Social Action; and TESOL Quarterly. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Equity and Cultural Diversity from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Samantha Hoehle
Conference Organizer, MA student in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University

Samantha Hoehle is an MA student in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies (MAHG) Program at Stockton University. Her thesis research examines eugenics in the United States, coupling an emphasis on im/migrants with disabilities with a broader analysis of the debilitating impact of eugenic rhetoric/actions of the government. Her scholarly interests also include border abolition, subaltern resistance to mass atrocities, and monstrosity studies.

Ahmed Kamal Junina
Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, Head of English Department, Al-Aqsa University

Ahmed Kamal Junina is assistant professor of applied linguistics and head of the English Department at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Palestine. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the European Centre for Palestinian Studies at the University of Exeter and a Fellow at the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE), University of Bristol, UK. His scholarship and advocacy have been featured in major media outlets, including CBC, CBS, The Independent, and The Guardian. He leads initiatives such as Resilient Voices and RECONNECT, supporting displaced youth in Gaza through capacity building, digital storytelling and multimodal narrative practices.

Rita Kamani-Renedo
PhD Candidate in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education and Curriculum and Teacher Education, Stanford

Rita Kamani-Renedo (she/ella) is a PhD Candidate in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education and Curriculum and Teacher Education in the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Her research interests lie at the intersection of migration, racialization, and education. Prior to her doctoral studies, Rita spent over a decade teaching in various contexts, including K-12 settings, adult education, and teacher education, and organizing around educational, racial, and migrant justice. Most recently, she was a humanities teacher at a public high school for multilingual recently arrived im/migrant youth in Brooklyn, New York.  She was also a core member of the New York Collective of Radical Educators.

Chandler Miranda
Assistant Professor of Education, Molloy University 

Chandler Patton Miranda is Assistant Professor of Education at Molloy University and an educational anthropologist whose work examines how educators create inclusive and empowering learning environments for recently arrived immigrant youth within exclusionary policy and political contexts.

She is the author of Sanctuary School: Innovating to Empower Immigrant Youth (Harvard Education Press, 2025), which outlines key mindset shifts for transforming schools into spaces of belonging and renewal. These shifts include recognizing the failures of the state and the social contract, valuing stability over urgency, truly knowing and caring for immigrant youth beyond their English proficiency, and rethinking students as active contributors and leaders rather than passive recipients.

Siobhán McGuirk
Researcher, Educator, and Journalist, Red Pepper

Dr Siobhán McGuirk is a social researcher specialising in migration, sexuality and gender, state power and justice movements. She is an editor of Red Pepper magazine and co-editor of the book Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry. Find out more about her work at siobhanmcguirk.com.

Conor “Coco” Tomas Reed
Editor, LÁPIZ Journal, Lost & Found:The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative

Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid, street scholar of social movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions). Coco is developing a new book project Hemisphere in Bloom, as well as a co-edited multilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones), They collaborate with CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and the CUNY Digital History Archive, and are a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found:The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Coco has been immersed in two decades of struggles at the City University of New York and in New York City around transforming education and public space, anti-imperialism, police and prison abolition, solidarity with Palestine and Puerto Rico, reproductive rights, housing justice, and beyond, and is now based in Philadelphia.

Reem Rosenhaj 
Founding member of Freedom Side School, Community Organizer and Educator

Reem Rosenhaj (she/her) is a community organizer and educator from Philly, and a founding member of Freedom Side School. Before joining Freedom Side’s staff as Director of Education, Reem spent six years as an elementary school teacher in several independent schools in the Philadelphia area. As an educator, Reem’s work focuses on developing and implementing abolitionist practices in the elementary school classroom and supporting young children to learn concrete organizing skills so they can build a more free world. Outside of teaching, Reem has been a volunteer community organizer, primarily in The Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI) and Decarcerate PA, for the past decade.

Tizoc Sánchez
Educator, Anthropologist

Tizoc Sánchez stumbled into activism through an avocado crisis: the day his favorite local tortillería shut down and was replaced by a spot selling avocado toast for three times the price of a full Mexican meal, he realized theory was no longer enough. It was time to get his hands dirty.

Today, he describes himself as an activist and digital educator, but his turf is broader—and more neighborly—than that. He's an excited student of the University of Neighborhood Social Praxis, an invisible institution where the curriculum includes things like looking out for your neighbor, weaving everyday networks, and understanding that activism also happens when you actually know the people at the corner store.

He can’t quit observing power. But not just the kind that sits in government offices and institutions—also the power etched into our minds, our emotions, our automatic gestures. And then there's that other power, the collective and transformative one, to which we should awaken more often.

His academic rap sheet includes two major heists. First, studying education at Mexico's largest public university and being a believer in public schools. In his thesis, he argued that the symbolic work happening in classrooms matters more than all the police forces combined when it comes to confronting the country's violence. Second, he snuck into an MA in Anthropology and Education at Columbia University, where he researched how the threads of power get woven (and unraveled) when an educational institution kicks one of its own out.

These days, when he's not dropping political analysis on social media, he practices his most artisanal craft: a therapeutic practice where he helps people unlearn what's excess and relearn what's missing. Emotional patterns, knee-jerk reactions, ways of inhabiting your body and your society. All guided by the same compass: building a healthier relationship with yourself and your social environment.

Because in the end, between the protest march and the therapy room, between the viral post and the sidewalk chat, Tizoc maintains that this—the everyday—is where power really plays out.

Silky Shah
Executive Director, Detention Watch Network

Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to end immigrant detention in the United States, and the author of Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024). Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11 and has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Teen Vogue, The Nation, Truthout, Inquest, and The Forge and she has appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.

Claudia Triana
Doctoral Candidate in Education Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin

Claudia M. Triana is a doctoral candidate in education policy studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A scholar of comparative and international education, her research focuses on the inequities of im/migration and education policies, displacement, and refusal.

John Washington
Translator, Author, and Reporter, Lookout and Lit & Border News

John Washington is a translator, author, and reporter. His latest book, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, will be published by Haymarket Books in July. He is also the author of The Case for Open Borders and The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border. He is a staff reporter at Lookout and writes a newsletter, Lit & Border News.

Freedom Side School
Abolitionist Elementary School, Philadelphia

Freedom Side School is a tuition-free abolitionist elementary school in Philadelphia for children with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated loved ones. We nurture our students as visionaries, organizers, and architects of a more free world. Freedom Side was founded in 2021 by a group of care-givers, organizers, and educators from the movement to end mass incarceration in PA. After years of planning and organizing we are preparing to open our doors to our first class of Kindergarten and 1st Graders in September 2026! www.freedomsideschool.org | ig: @freedomsideschool