Yasminah Beebeejaun, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, UK and has held lectureships at University of Manchester and University of the West of England, Bristol. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign; the University of Illinois, Chicago; the University of Michigan; and the American Philosophical Society. Yasminah’s teaching and research focuses on public participation and grassroots activism drawing upon interdisciplinary and comparative approaches. Her current research projects include work on public space and ethnic diversity in Europe, provision of cemeteries and crematoria for multi-ethnic groups in the UK, the construction of knowledge within planning decision making, and comparative work on shale gas development in the UK and the US. Her publications have focused on community mobilization, constructions of race and ethnicity in planning, and feminist planning. She is the editor of The Participatory City (jovis, 2016) and has published articles in a range of journals including Environment and Planning C, The Journal of Urban Affairs, Planning Theory and Practice, Urban Studies, and the Community Development Journal. Yasminah was a board member of UAA from 2014 to 2019, serving as vice-chair during 2017 and 2018.
Ali Modarres, Ph.D. is Professor and Director of Urban Studies, and Assistant Chancellor for Community Partnerships at the University of Washington Tacoma. He specializes in urban planning and public policy and his primary research and publication interests are socio-spatial urban dynamics and the political economy of urban design. He has published in the areas of immigration, race and ethnicity in American cities, social geography, transportation planning, environmental equity, and urban development and public policy. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning for eight years until 2017. Prior to that, he served as the Book Review Editor for the same journal. By the time he stepped down in 2017, the journal had achieved an impressive annual submission rate and an impact factor exceeding 2.5, making Cities the second highest-ranking urban planning/urban studies journal in the world. Ali is a long-term member of the Urban Affairs Association, a former UAA Board member, and winner of two best paper awards from the Journal of Urban Affairs, both of which focused on issues of race and ethnicity in American cities.
