A Celebration of Works that Expand Our Political Imagination

Join the Ford School's Center for Racial Justice for a rich conversation with three esteemed scholars and CRJ Visiting Fellows - whose art, scholarship, and activism expand our political imagination for transformative social change. The Fellows will be in conversation with Ford School Dean, Celeste Watkins-Hayes.

Accessibility

CART and sign language interpretation will be provided during the in-person event. Presenters will use microphones.

About the panelists and moderator

Dr. Amanda Alexander, the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center, is a racial justice lawyer and historian who works alongside community-based movements to end mass incarceration and build thriving and inclusive cities. Originally from Michigan, Amanda has worked at the intersection of racial justice and community development in Detroit, New York, and South Africa for more than 15 years.

Charlene Carruthers is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer, and Black Studies PhD Candidate at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her work interrogates historical conjunctures of Black freedom-making post-emancipation and decolonial revolution, Black/Native/Indigenous relationalities, Black governance, and Black feminist abolitionist geographies. For her catalyst project, Carruthers will present behind the scenes photos, stills, and select clips from her short film PLENUM, which follows the journey of two siblings as they navigate the AIDS crisis at a historical Black LGBT conference.

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. For her catalyst project, Dr. Wilson will discuss components of her book and article project on LGBT poverty, with an emphasis on the implications of learning about different factors and pathways to poverty for LGBT subgroups.

Celeste Watkins-Hayes is the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of Public Policy at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She is an internationally-recognized scholar and expert widely credited for her research at the intersection of inequality, public policy, and human service institutions, with a special focus on HIV/AIDS; poverty; and race, class, and gender studies.

• Center for Racial Justice
• Center for Racial Justice Visiting Fellows
• racial justice
• activism
• LGBTQ