Jane McAlevey Residency

2026 - Alina Shen

Alina is a NYC-based organizer. For the past decade, she has been working with CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities organizing an intergenerational membership of working class immigrant tenants and youth across six languages to build neighborhood-based tenant unions. Since 2021, CAAAV's purpose is to constrict the real estate industry and win universal rent control. In 2024, Alina was promoted to Organizing Director at CAAAV, sharpening organizing structures and political education necessary to align members and staff toward a shared analysis and implementation of strategy within a broader social movement. During her tenure, CAAAV became an organization focused on winning demands for working-class tenants through leveraging neighborhood power to make city and statewide change. Externally, Alina positioned CAAAV to become one of the leaders of the Statewide Housing Justice for All Coalition and drive the fight to win a historic city-wide rent freeze for 2.4 million tenants (which passed in 2026!).

Alina describes organizing as beautiful, difficult work. At BMC, she reflected on years of organizing and moved through grief from losses, both human and movement. She spent time playing, porch sitting, paddle-boarding, and writing essays and fantastical fiction.

2025 - r.h. Lossin

R.H. Lossin is the inaugural recipient of the Jane McAlevey Residency. An an educator and writer, Lossin’s work explores themes of labor, technology, contemporary art, and American radicalism. She currently teaches courses on American history, politics, and art at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The Nation, New Left Review (her first essay for New Left Review was completed during a prior residency at Blue Mountain Center), and Jacobin, among others. Upon being awarded the McAlevey residency, Lossin replied, "Nothing could make me happier than hearing that my writing conveys a political vision worthy of Jane McAlevey's legacy."

While at BMC, she focused on writing and editing her first book, Sabotage: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Idea, an interdisciplinary study of the sabotage campaigns carried out by the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers and the Industrial Workers of the World, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. When she wasn’t writing, she could be found swimming in Eagle Lake.