Michael Dear is Professor of Geography and Director of the Southern California Studies Center at the University of Southern California. He was recently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. He received Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 1995. He is the author/editor of a dozen books including most recently The Postmodern Urban Condition (Blackwell, 2000), and From Chicago to LA: Making Sense of Urban Theory (Sage, 2001).
Steven Flusty is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Southern California. He is the author of numerous articles for academic journals, professional publications and the popular press, as well as a monograph on spaces of surveillant control entitled "Building Paranoia: The Proliferation of Interdictory Space and the Erosion of Spatial Justice." In addition to his current, on-going research into the everyday practices of global formation, he has worked in industrial design, architecture, and urban design for both the public and private sectors.