Reimagining the Narrative

Join the Ford School's Center for Racial Justice for a conversation with our 2025-2026 Visiting Fellows. The Fellows will discuss their work challenging dominant narratives around race, power, and place, with perspectives on suburban life, policing, and the role of art in social change. Lunch from Jerusalem Garden provided.

Accessibility note: the event will not be live-streamed, but a captioned recording will be sent to all registrants afterwards. Presenters will use microphones.

About the speakers

Ayesha Bell Hardaway, JD, is a Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University where she serves as Director of the Law School's Social Justice Law Center and its Criminal Defense Clinic. Professor Hardaway also serves as Director of the University's Social Justice Institute. Her leadership role at the Social Justice Institute began in May 2020 after an appointment by then Provost Ben Vincent III. Professor Hardaway's research and scholarship interests include the intersection of race with constitutional law, criminal law, policing, and civil litigation. She has written on many topics including reparations, labor law, the Thirteenth Amendment, and policing.

Holly Bass is an award-winning, socially-engaged artist working across multiple disciplines including dance, theater, visual art and writing. She has collaborated with governmental agencies, cultural institutions, nonprofit organizations and academic communities to create innovative artistic experiences that foster connection among groups of strangers. Her artwork can be found in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. She was a founding member of DC WritersCorps which sent her into schools, community centers and women's shelters to teach poetry workshops. She continues to travel the country and the world, using the arts to build community and transform the social culture of classrooms, workplaces and public spaces.

R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy (PhD '08) is a scholar whose work and activism center issues of race, place, education, and opportunity. He is an Associate Professor at New York University in the Sociology of Education program in the School of Culture, Education and Human Development. He is author of the forthcoming book A Dream Dissolved: How Opportunity Hoarding Bankrupted Education (One Signal – Simon & Shuster/Atria). He is the co-lead investigator of the Black Suburban Experience Project. His first book, Inequality in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, 2014) tackled how inequality persisted in an "integrated" school and suburban community. His larger research interests include race and racism, gender justice, and community mobilization.

Center for Racial Justice

Center for Racial Justice Visiting Fellows

policing

suburbs

Gender race and ethnicity

performance art

democracy