Cristina Beltrán, Ph.D., works at the intersection of Latinx politics and political theory. She is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. From 2001 until 2011, she taught in the Political Science Department at Haverford College; in 2013-14, she was a resident member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and in 2019 she was an advanced seminar member at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M. Her work has appeared in Political Theory, the Du Bois Review, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Political Research Quarterly, and various edited volumes.
She is currently the co-editor of Theory & Event, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes work by scholars working at the intersections of political theory, cultural theory, political economy, aesthetics, philosophy, and the arts. She is also an occasional guest on MSNBC.
Her forthcoming book Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy explores the American right’s deep antipathy toward nonwhite migrants from Mexico and Latin America and examines why acts of cruelty against migrants are so gratifying (and even pleasurable) for many in the Republican Party. Other book projects include Uncertain Identities: Aesthetics, Affect, and the Shifting Politics of Race, a two-volume collection of essays that explores a variety of topics including Latino conservatism, sovereignty and desire, the aesthetics of representation, and the multiracial challenge of working ethically at the intersection of race and political theory.
Natasha N. Iskander, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change. She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, and worker rights, with more than 30 articles and book chapters on these topics. Her first book, Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Cornell University Press, ILR imprint, 2010), looked at the ways that migrant workers transformed the economic development policies of their countries of origin.
Her forthcoming book, Skill & Bondage: Migrant Workers in Qatar and in a Warming World (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines the use of skill categories to limit freedom of movement and narrow access to political rights, in ways that have become increasingly salient with the hardening borders and the pressures of climate change.
Dr. Iskander’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Qatar National Research Foundation, and others. She has held positions as a fellow-in-residence at the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility at the New School for Social Research, at the Center for Advanced Studies of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and at the Global Research Institute at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Dr. Iskander received her PhD in Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She also holds a Masters in City Planning (MCP) from MIT, and a BA in Cultural Studies from Stanford University. In addition to her research, she engages in development work with partners ranging from the World Bank to small NGOs, internationally and in the United States, on issues of urban development, migration and development policy, and migrant worker rights.