Practical Radicals: How Oppressed People Change the World

media release: This event is presented by the Havens Wright Center in collaboration with the School for Workers at UW-Madison.

Stephanie Luce is professor of labor studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, and Professor of Sociology at the Gradate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA in economics at the University of California, Davis and both her PhD in sociology and her MA in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of Fighting for a Living Wage, and co-author of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy, and The Measure of Fairness. She is also author of Labor Movements: Global Perspectives. Her latest book, co-authored with Deepak Bhargava, is Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World.

Deepak Bhargava is president of the JBP Foundation. Since 2019, he has been a distinguished lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. He previously led Community Change for 16 years, where he worked to strengthen the community organizing field and launched coalitions that achieved major policy reforms at the federal level on issues such as poverty, health care, and immigration. Bhargava has trained and mentored hundreds of leaders who’ve played key roles in progressive organizations and social justice movements, and, more recently, he co-founded a new organization, Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, which trains and supports early and mid-career people working for social change, especially people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people from working-class backgrounds.

He has served on the boards of numerous organizations, including the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, the Open Society Foundations (US), and 350.org, where he was Board Chair. He currently serves on the board of the Democracy Fund. Bhargava is the co-author of Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World with Stephanie Luce (New Press, 2023) and co-editor of Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future with Ruth Milkman and Penny Lewis (New Press, 2021). He was a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute from 2020-2023, where he co-authored The Statue of Liberty Plan: A Progressive Vision for Migration in the Age of Climate Change with Rich Stolz and The Death of “Deliverism” in Democracy Journal with Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury, which explores the relationship of economic policy to political allegiances. He has written extensively about community organizing, public policy related to poverty and economic justice, progressive strategy, civic engagement, and racial justice among many other topics for The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today, The Nation, The American Prospect, Huffington Post, and Democracy Journal, and he has been featured in major news outlets such as National Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, National Public Radio, and MSNBC. Bhargava is married to Harry W. Hanbury, a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Bangalore, India, and grew up in New York City, where he currently resides.