Dylan Bellisle is a doctoral candidate at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His research interests include poverty and inequality, family well-being, and the financial coping and social mobility strategies of low-income families. Dylan’s dissertation explores the ways in which extended family and social network members shape how single mothers spend and allocate their earned income tax credit and tax refunds. His dissertation is funded by the 2019 Fahs-Beck Fund doctoral dissertation grant. Dylan received a B.A. in psychology from the University of South Florida and a Master’s in social work from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2011, with a concentration in community health and urban development. Prior to his doctoral studies, Dylan served as a program manager at the Center for Economic Progress on a demonstration project of a periodic payment of the earned income tax credit in collaboration with a researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dylan has past professional experience as a social service case worker, a union organizer, and a Peace Corps volunteer.

Matthew Borus is a joint doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and the School of Social Service Administration.  He studies the political sociology of disability, asking how disabled activists advance claims for anti-discrimination protections, health care, and access to both physical and metaphorical public spheres. Through both archival and ethnographic approaches, he looks at the creation of activist spaces, the orientation of social movement organizations toward the state, and the development of political imaginaries.  Matthew earned his BA at Oberlin College, and his MSW and MPP from the University of Michigan.

Justin Harty is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. He earned his master’s degree in social work, with a concentration in children and families, from the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds bachelor’s degrees in both sociology and philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include father involvement and engagement among fathers with children involved in the child welfare system as well as impregnation and early fatherhood among young fathers in foster care. His current dissertation work includes a study of young Black fathers aging out of the foster care system. His research is informed by several years of practice experience in child welfare as a foster care caseworker in Chicago, Illinois. He is also a licensed clinical social worker serving child welfare involved fathers and fathers in foster care. In addition to fatherhood research and practice, he provides father-focused trainings to child welfare and family strengthening agencies around father involvement and engagement.

Daniel Knorr is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, with a specialization in late imperial and modern Chinese history. His research interests include urban history, spatial politics, and social history. His dissertation, “Putting Empire in Its Place: Localism and the Qing Imperial State in Jinan, Shandong, 1733-1926” examines the relationship between place and state in a provincial capital in North China. In addition to the history of China and East Asia, he also teaches world history. In 2019-20, he is supported by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Center for International Social Science Research. In 2016-17, he conducted archival research in Jinan and Beijing with the support of a Fulbright fellowship. He received his M.A. in history from the University of California, Irvine and his B.A. in History and East Asian Studies from Johns Hopkins University.

Shannon is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology, with research interests in culture, urban sociology, and inequality. Her work is primarily concerned with the role of organizations in defining and representing communities through cultural projects like historic preservation, revitalization, and place-making. Her current research draws on ethnographic methods and archival data to understand how various arts organizations and artist communities have contributed to neighborhood gentrification. Prior to her doctoral studies, Shannon worked as a trainer and consultant at a national nonprofit based in Atlanta, GA. She holds a MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in Sociology from Whitman College, with minors in Gender Studies and Race & Ethnic Studies.

Angelica Velazquillo is a doctoral candidate in the School of Social Service Administration (SSA) at the University of Chicago.  Her research focuses on U.S. immigration policies and their impact on immigrant communities. For her dissertation Angelica is exploring how immigrants perceive and experience Chicago’s sanctuary policies. Prior to her doctoral work Angelica obtained a master’s degree from UChicago SSA and a graduate certificate in Health Administration and Policy. Angelica was also a recipient of the Human Rights Internship at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.

Ilana Ventura is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Chicago and a Research Methodologist at NORC at the University of Chicago. She holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Amherst College. As a graduate student, Ilana is
interested in immigrant and second-generation labor market attainment. Methodologically, she is interested in better capturing the labor market trajectories and barriers to employment of underrepresented segments of the immigrant population, as well as integrating space and place-based data into our understanding of labor force data collection and labor market outcomes. At NORC, Ilana works on both cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and has both managed and participated in several survey design projects to increase response rates of Hispanic, bilingual and other hard-to-reach groups. She has presented work at Population Association of America (PAA), the International Conference on Survey Methods in Multinational, Multiregional and Multicultural Contexts (3MC), American Association of Public Opinion Researchers (AAPOR), Midwest Association of Public Opinion Researchers (MAPOR) and the Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference.

Lucas Wehrwein (AB ’15, MA ’16) is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the department of Sociology. His research focuses on everyday life amongst a group of homeless people in Chicago.

Tadeo is a doctoral student in the School of Social Service Administration. He is interested in political discourse and ideology, particularly in relation to marginalized groups amidst urban change. Tadeo’s project is an ongoing ethnographic account of the political and racial ideologies evoked, invoked, and practiced around the Obama Presidential Library. Prior to graduate school, Tadeo worked as part of juvenile justice reform efforts in Kansas. Tadeo has an MA in Social Work from the School of Social Service Administration and a BA in sociology with honors from Stanford University.