Team Members

She is an activist and writer who has focused on women’s rights and racial justice since the 1960s. She is a co-editor of, and a contributor to, Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections. Burnham served as National Research Director and Senior Advisor at the National Domestic Workers Alliance for nearly a decade. She co-authored Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work and Living in the Shadows: Latina Domestic Workers in the Texas-Mexico Border Region. Burnham co-founded, with Miriam Ching Louie, the Women of Color Resource Center and served as the organization’s Executive Director for 18 years. In the 1970s, Burnham was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance. Burnham has published numerous articles on African-American women, African-American politics, and feminist theory in a wide range of periodicals and anthologies. She recently completed Project2050, an inquiry into strategic thinking on the left. Burnham’s writing and organizing are part of a lifelong exploration of the dynamic intersections of race, class and gender.

She is a human rights attorney, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She recently completed a non-resident fellowship of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as Human Geography. She is a co-founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as national organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura has also produced video documentaries, including "Gaza In Context" and "Black Palestinian Solidarity.” Her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and the Boston Review. She is a frequent commentator on CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, the BBC, and NPR, among others.

She is the sustainable Development Program Coordinator for International Indian Treaty Council and the council’s representative as co-convenor of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group of the U.N. High-level Political Forum on the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. She is also co-founder Sixth World Solutions LLP, Navajo Nation Little Colorado River Watershed Chapters Association. She is a community organizer and human rights advocate who has worked on development and energy issues with indigenous communities across the United States. She has built expertise in infrastructure policy, integrated land and water management, and restoration and protection of traditional ecological knowledge systems. Locally, she is the manager of Indigenous Infrastructure and Policy for Latin Group LLC., through which she serves as project manager for the Laguna Broadband Network project led by the Pueblo of Laguna Utility Authority. She also serves as co-chair of the Traditional and Cultural Values Subcommittee of the Navajo Nation Genetics Research Policy working group. She sits on the advisory board of the Oxfam Land Rights Now Campaign and is also a member of the Right Energy Partnership, an international initiative led by the IPMG to apply a Human rights framework in sustainable energy development projects globally.

She is a scholar-activist. She is co-founder of organizations and programs such as: Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity; the Arab Women's Solidarity Association; Arab Movement of Women arising for Justice; the Arab American Cultural Center (UIC); and Arab and Muslim American Studies at UM, Ann Arbor. She is founder of Liberate Your Research Workshops. She has been a board member of groups like INCITE! Women and Gender non-Conforming People against Violence; the Women of Color Resource Center; the Arab American Action Network; Al-Shabaka; and the National Council of Arab Americans. She is Professor in the Gender and Women's Studies Program and the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is author/co-editor of six books, including Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012); Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, 2008); Arab and Arab American Feminisms, winner of the Arab American Book Award 2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2010); The Color of Violence (South End Press, 2006), Towards the Sun (Tadween Press/George Mason University, 2020) and Pedagogies of the Radical Mother (Haymarket Press, In progress). She is lead author of the policy reports, “Beyond Profiling and Erasure: Cultivating Strong and Vibrant Arab American Communities in Chicagoland.” (IRRPP/UIC, 2022) and “The Paradox of Social Development in the Arab Region” (United Nations, 2015). She is the recipient of various awards such as the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Prize from the American Studies Association; the 2002 YWCA’s Y-Women’s Leadership Award; and the 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Humanities without Walls Grand Research Challenge Award.

She is Executive Director and founder of the Surveillance Resistance Lab. For nearly twenty years, Mizue has focused on ending the injustices—including criminalization, imprisonment, and exile—at the intersections of the criminal and migration control systems. Prior to launching the Lab, Mizue was a Senior Advisor at the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) and the founder and Project Director of the Surveillance, Tech and Immigration Project. At IDP, Mizue developed the advocacy program and led multiple campaigns to end the entanglement of local law enforcement and ICE policing—including the fights to end Secure Communities in New York State, and the New York City detainer campaigns—and also led the statewide ICE Out of Courts Campaign. Mizue also co-launched IDP’s ICE raids and community defense programs. Prior to IDP, Mizue worked as a strategic researcher at the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union, Local 11, and as a racial justice organizer. Mizue is a co-editor of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (forthcoming from Haymarket Books, Fall 2023). Mizue’s photographic work appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016). Mizue holds a MA in Urban Planning from UCLA.