About the Center for Racial Justice

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, PhD, is the Jean E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor, and professor of sociology at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Department of Sociology. She is an author and educator widely credited for her research at the intersection of inequality, public policy, and institutions, with a special focus on urban poverty and race, class, and gender studies.

Dominique Adams-Santos is the associate director of the Center for Racial Justice at the Ford School and an Anti-Racism Collaborative Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Institutional Diversity. Additionally, she serves as Special Assistant to the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. Dr. Adams-Santos is a qualitative researcher who centers questions of sexuality, intimacy, and belonging in the digital era. Specifically, she seeks to understand how individuals navigate the racial, gender, and sexual politics of digital and urban landscapes in their search for intimacy and community. She has published articles on digital sexuality and intimacy in Sexualities and Sociology Compass. As a queer woman of color scholar, Dr. Adams-Santos is especially invested in mapping the contours of urban and digital placemaking among racialized and gendered sexual minorities, the subject of her dissertation project. She earned her PhD in sociology with a certificate in gender and sexuality studies from Northwestern University.

Sharanya Pai's work is at the intersection of design, policy, and activism. Her experiences range from working with community activists, leaders, and students at the Brightmoor Makerspace in Detroit, to designing and managing local campaigns for candidates running for the Michigan State Legislature, to working on the Detroit Land Bank Authority’s Rehabbed and Ready program. She specializes in framing and prioritizing marginalized identities through visual design, project management, and facilitation. Her areas of expertise and interest are economic development, complex systems and social structures, community engagement, and designing physical and digital experiences. Her ability to synthesize, process, and visualize data while providing concise contextual analysis is the result of her academic and professional achievements.