How to write the story of a social movement? How to narrate political history? This panel features nonfiction writers who engage innovative storytelling techniques and oral histories to explore everything from homeownership in America to student activism in Taiwan.

• Bernadette Atuahene is a Harvard and Yale-trained property law scholar whose work focuses on land and homes stolen from Black people. She holds the Duggan Chair at the USC Gould School of Law. She served as a judicial clerk at the South African Constitutional Court, worked as a consultant for the South African Land Claims Commission, and practiced at a global law firm called Cleary Gottlieb. She is the author of Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America, which follows the lives of two grandfathers—one Black, the other white—and their grandchildren, telling a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root and flourish, why they advance, and who profits.

• Wendy Cheng is professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race and Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012). Her articles and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Zócalo Public Square, and the recently published Writing the Golden State anthology, among other publications.

• Dr. Brittany Friedman is recognized as an innovative thinker on how people and institutions hide harmful truths. She uncovers this within the realm of social control, looking at the underside of government. New ongoing work examines this within interpersonal relations. She is the author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run our Prisons, featured in Ms. Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Blackest Book Club, among many others. Friedman has written for outlets such as TIME and The Washington Post, and is an assistant professor of Sociology at USC, co-founder of the Captive Money Lab, and Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation.
• Nayan Shah (moderator) is a historian whose books uncover how people struggle with migration, incarceration, and illness in the United States and across the globe. He is author of three award-winning books, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (2022), Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001),  and Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (2001). Shah is professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at USC.