Our Advisors

Paloma Checa-Gismero

Sarah Gzesh

Sarah has worked in direct practice with marginalized young people for over a decade, as both an educator and therapist. They earned a Masters in Social Work from Columbia University, and as a clinician, they worked at Westcoast Children’s Clinic and Larkin Street Youth Services, supporting system-involved youth experiencing sexual exploitation, substance use, and homelessness. 

Sarah is a doctoral student at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, and their research focuses on both clinical and conceptual components of social welfare. They are passionate about exploring how identity-based supports provide corrective experiences for past attachment ruptures, embodied oppression, and complex trauma for LGBTQ+ youth. They use community-based and participatory modes of research to better ascertain gauges of distress for queer and trans youth, recognizing the continuum of agency between consensual sex work and sexual exploitation, and the need for mutual aid and harm reduction for individuals involved in street economies. 

Their historical scholarship includes the study of past practices, so as to elucidate present-day problematics regarding pathologization of multiply marginalized individuals. Sarah’s goal is to expand definitions of family systems and non-biological kinship within the field of social welfare, so as to harness cultural wealth embedded in LGBTQ+ communities, and to use research-informed practice and practice-informed research to improve clinical interventions for transitional age youth.

Samantha Hill

Nina Johnson

Nina Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Program in Black Studies at Swarthmore College. Consistent with her training in Urban Studies, African-American Studies, and Culture and Communication, her research interests lie in the areas of inequality, politics, race, space, class, culture, stratification and mobility.

She has recently published papers on political issues relative to black experiences of upward mobility and ruminations on a sociology of Black Liberation and contributed to a documentary (Turning A Corner, Beyondmedia Productions) on the legal, economic, and social barriers to exiting street level sex work. She has presented work on the representations of race, class and place in mid century black novels, including the work of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston and a community video project on the impact of Islam on black religious, social and political life in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. Her book revisits the classic works of W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier and considers meaning making processes among the black elite, its relationship to the larger black population, and its role in any projects of collective racial advancement.

Her current research is a multi-method study of the impacts of mass incarceration at the neighborhood level, which is complemented by her teaching in State Correctional Institutions in Pennsylvania. She is a member of both the Graterford and Chester Think Tanks, two communities of scholars who work on issues related to the criminal legal system and provide opportunities for engagement across the physical and social barriers that prisons create. She wholeheartedly endorses every word of James Baldwin, but finds the following particularly prescient in shaping and informing her work, “The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.”

Carolyn Levy

Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad

Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad is a Philadelphia born organizer, writer and cofounder of the Black and Brown Workers Co-op. In their work they often problematize medical surveillance, discuss the importance of bodily autonomy and center Blackness.

Naiymah Sanchez