T. Alexander Aleinikoff, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees
Before becoming the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees UNHCR in February 2010, T. Alexander Aleinikoff served as Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center and Executive Vice President of Georgetown University from July 2004 to January 2010. He has been a member of the Georgetown Law faculty since 1997.
Dean Aleinikoff served as General Counsel and Executive Associate Commissioner for Programs at the Immigration and Naturalization Service for several years during the Clinton Administration.
From 1997 to 2004 he was a Senior Associate at the Migration Policy Institute, and a
member of MPI’s Board of Trustees from 2004 to 2010. In 2008 he was co-chair of the Immigration Taskforce for president Obama transition. In 2001-2002, Mr. Aleinikoff served as a consultant to UNHCR, working on the Global Consultations on Refugee Protection.
A graduate of Swarthmore College and the Yale Law School, Mr. Aleinikoff is an expert in refugee, immigration and citizenship law. He is the author of numerous books and articles on these subjects.
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John Jota Leaños, new media artist, animator and social documentarian
Leaños’s work focuses on the convergence of memory/history, social space/power and decolonization. Leaños’ animation work has been shown internationally at festivals and museums including the Sundance Film Festival, the Morelia International Film Festival, Mexico, San Francisco International Festival of Animation, the KOS Convention 07, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
Leaños is a Guggenheim Fellow in Film (2012) and Creative Capital Foundation Grantee who has also exhibited at the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been an Artist in Residence at Carnegie Mellon University in the Center for Arts in Society, at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Center for Chicano Studies and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Leaños is currently an Associate Professor of Social Documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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aihwa ong, Professor of sociocultural anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies, university of California Berkeley
As a foreign-born anthropologist, Aihwa Ong has always approached research from vantage points outside or athwart the United States. This angle of inquiry unsettles and troubles stabilized viewpoints and units of analysis in the social sciences. Ong’s projects — the impact of runaway factories on the Muslim women in Malaysia; overseas Chinese navigating multiple immigration regimes; the disciplinary regimes that socialize Cambodian refugees in California; the selective deployment of neoliberal norms in China; and the interaction of biotechnologies and ethics in Asian contexts _ are investigations on the situated nature of global phenomena that challenge conventional anthropological frameworks.
Ong’s approach is inter-disciplinary and her ideas — “flexible citizenship,” “graduated sovereignty,” “global assemblages,” among others _ are featured in debates on globalization and modernity. She has lectured internationally and been invited to the World Economic Forum. Her awards include grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and some book prizes.
On campus, Ong is affiliated with the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Global Metropolitan Studies Center, the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
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Susan Brower, Minnesota State Demographer, Minnesota State Demographic Center
Susan Brower is the Minnesota State Demographer and directs the MN State Demographic Center. Susan became the State Demographer in February 2012. In that capacity, she travels the state talking with Minnesotans about the new social and economic realities that are brought about by recent demographic shifts. Susan’s work applies an understanding of demographic trends to changes in a range of areas including the state’s economy and workforce, education, health, immigration and rural population changes.
Susan earned her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Michigan, specializing in demography and family sociology. She also holds a master’s degree in public policy from Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.