Visiting Fellows Program

Call for Proposals

Applications for the AY 2025-26 CRJ Visiting Fellows Program are open! Through a non-residential program, visiting fellows are given the time, space, and resources to create and produce catalyst projects that have clear potential to inform public debate, policy development, and scholarly analysis pertinent to (anti)racism and racial justice. Along with other topics, we are especially interested in supporting catalyst projects that focus on:

Disability justice and advocacy
LGBTQ policy & queer and trans advocacy
Immigration policy
Racial reparations and healing
Reproductive health and justice
Social movements and grassroots mobilization
State-sanctioned violence and the criminal justice system

Please submit your resume/CV and a letter describing your planned catalyst project. In the letter, please (1) detail your experience and past preparation to successfully advance the project; (2) provide a timeline for project advancement and completion; (3) explain how access to the Center for Racial Justice, the Ford School of Public Policy, and the University of Michigan will help to advance the project; and (4) identify and describe the intended audience of the work and how the catalyst project could significantly advance the goal of racial equity. Letters must be submitted to Dr. Dom Adams-Santos (fspp.racialjustice@umich.edu) by Tuesday, April 15.

Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Visiting Fellows Program is a non-residential fellowship and signature initiative of the Center for Racial Justice. The program offers social justice leaders, activists, artists, advocates, and scholars a prestigious, highly competitive fellowship designed to recognize their transformative work to date and provide opportunities to advance their future endeavors.

Meet Our 2024-25 Cohort

Visiting Fellow

Dr. Amanda Alexander

Visiting Fellow, Center for Racial Justice

As a racial justice lawyer, historian, organizer, and writer, Dr. Amanda Alexander has dedicated her career to building the power of community-based movements for social change. She is the founder and former Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center (DJC), a movement lawyering organization working to create economic opportunities, transform the legal system, and promote equitable and just cities. While leading DJC, Amanda co-hosted and co-produced Freedom Dreams, an interview podcast that amplifies movement voices and explores the many paths to building a truly just future. Amanda is a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights and has served on the national steering committee of Law for Black Lives and the board of the James & Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. Her writing has been published in Boston Review, Yale Law & Policy Review, Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe, Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy, Howard Human & Civil Rights Law Review, and other publications. Amanda earned her JD from Yale Law School and a PhD in international and global history from Columbia University.

Visiting Fellow

Charlene A. Carruthers

Visiting Fellow, Center for Racial Justice

Charlene A. Carruthers (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer, and Black
Studies PhD candidate at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more
complete stories, her work interrogates Black governance, Black and Indigenous
relationality, and Black feminist abolitionist geographies. She is a 2020 Marguerite
Casey Presidential Freedom Scholar and Mellon Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellow in
Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her work spans more than 15 years of community
organizing across racial, gender, and economic justice movements. She is the founding national director of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), and author of the bestselling book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.

Personal website

Visiting Fellow

Bianca D. Wilson

Visiting Fellow, Center for Racial Justice

Bianca D.M. Wilson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs and an affiliate faculty member of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. Her research explores the relationships between culture, oppression, and health. Bianca examines LGBTQ economic instabilities and involvement with systems of care and criminalization, with a focus on the ways racialization, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression play a role in creating disproportionality and disparities. Notably, she was the lead investigator on the first study to establish population estimates of how many LGBTQ youth are in foster care and has led similar work in juvenile criminalization. Similarly, she was the PI for a large-scale qualitative study of the life and needs of LGBTQ people experiencing economic insecurity. Underlying her substantive works on social status and wellbeing is her focus on SOGIE data policies. She has conducted SOGIE measurement research among youth and adults and continues to work collaboratively on efforts to increase and improve LGBTQ inclusive data collection. To that end, she served on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Consensus Panel on the Measurement of Sex, Gender and Sexual Orientation.