Seven faculty members named 2026 Research & Community Impact Faculty Fellows
September 29, 20262026 Graduate Anti-Racism Research Grants
September 29, 2026
By: Stephanie Zephir
The Phillip J. Bowman Center for Scholarship to Practice has awarded 19 research grants to individuals and teams comprised of University of Michigan (U-M) graduate students.
“Over the past six years, the Graduate Anti-Racism Research Grants have supported the Bowman Center’s mission to empower intergenerational U-M scholars engaging in research that contribute to efforts to create an equitable and inclusive society,” says Elizabeth R. Cole, Phillip J. Bowman Center director and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies. “I am honored that the Bowman Center gets to support this new cohort of scholars through our monthly workshops, which are designed to support their professional development and scholarly impact.”
This Bowman Center grant enables U-M graduate students to pursue research projects centered around racism, racial equity, and racial justice. Student-focused in its design, the initiative aims to support research projects while advancing graduate student progress toward degree completion and providing ongoing professional development and support to grantees.
Grant recipients include master's and doctoral students from various fields and disciplines across the university, including political science, anthropology, environmental justice, business, dance, and education.
"I deeply appreciate the efforts that will be put forth by our award recipients," says Alford Young Jr., Bowman Center Faculty Director for Anti-Racism Research and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Sociology, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Public Policy. "Racial inequality remains a pervasive aspect of social life. This is the case even as some in our world are troubled by having to acknowledge this. Through their scholarship, those supported by this initiative are confronting both this enduring pervasiveness and the forces in play that minimize attention to it. Ultimately, the pursuit of social equality for all is contingent upon the kinds of insights and understandings that will be generated from this research."
The Bowman Center will host opportunities for the campus and broader communities to engage with award recipients and learn more about their research during the 2026–2027 academic year. All awarded projects and grantees are detailed below. Join us as we congratulate our newest cohort of anti-racism research graduate grantees!
2026 Graduate Research Projects
Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in Teachers’ Responses to African American English in Children’s Fictional Oral Storytelling
Atiya Addie (PhD Student in Combined Program in Education and Psychology)
Systemic racism marginalizes the use of African American English (AAE) in U.S. schooling, often mischaracterizing this rule-governed system as a linguistic deficit. This study investigates how early childhood educators explain their responses to African American children’s fictional storytelling using AAE. Using semi-structured interviews, this study uses raciolinguistics and anti-Black linguistic racism as frameworks to examine how the intersection of race and language contribute to how teachers pedagogically respond to and support the literacy development of African American children. Findings aim to illuminate systemic racism and educational inequities in how educators respond to African American children’s AAE-use in oral narrative contexts.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Lauren Smith (Master’s Student in Dance)
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a multidisciplinary dance-film project reinterpreting Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic text of the same name through the lens of identity fluidity and systemic societal expectations. By visualizing a singular room shifting across multiple eras (1890s-2020s), this research investigates how structural pressures and domestic confinement converge to fragment the female psyche. Utilizing original choreography, cinematography, and immersive set design, this project articulates the exhaustion of adapting to rigid societal molds as a site of resilience and resistance. This work challenges systemic invisibility, transforming an individual’s internal struggle into a public call for equity and the dismantling of historical stigmas surrounding personal expression and autonomy.
Remembering Violence and Violent Remembrance: Responsibility, Space, and the Politics of Museums
Ekaterina Shipyatsky (PhD Student in Political Theory)
"Remembering Violence and Violent Remembrance" traces the work of museums and memorials (memory institutions) that narrate histories of genocidal violence in the United States and Poland: museums and memorials of enslavement and lynching in the American South, the Holocaust in Poland, and of Native genocide in the United States. Exploring the ways that these institutions construct spaces, public discourses, and narratives of violence, this project exposes the role of museums and memorials in developing and disseminating theories of political responsibility. These institutions, I argue, instruct publics in who is culpable for past violence, but also what it means to be culpable in the first place.
PFAS Exposure from Cultural Personal Care Products: Addressing Chemical Inequality in Black Communities
Cynthia Adebayo (PhD Student in Environmental Health Sciences)
Black women, as the leading consumers of beauty products, are disproportionately exposed to toxic ingredients linked to endocrine disruption, uterine fibroids, and breast cancer. Poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) utilized in personal care products (PCPs) are persistent contaminants that can impact the thyroid gland function. There is an urgent need to address and investigate the unknown burden of exposure to PFAS from cultural PCPs (i.e., hair products) and the potential effect on the thyroid's functionality, especially among vulnerable populations. This research will further our knowledge of the risk to the thyroid posed by the presence of PFAS in PCPs.
Land Return as a Mechanism For Ecological and Community Resilience
Elysa Tanner-Linsalata (Masters Student in Environmental Policy and Planning, Environmental Justice), Hanna Jeffers (Master’s Student in Landscape Architecture, Environmental Policy and Planning, and Ecosystem Science and Management), Elsa Cline (PhD/masters Student in Ecosystem Science and Management, and Landscape Architecture), Kate Perazzo (Master’s Student in Ecosystem Science and Management, and Landscape Architecture), Adam Kaminsky (Master’s Student in Landscape Architecture, Ecosystem Science and Management, and Geospatial Data Science), Edwin Kinsey IV (Master’s Student in Landscape Architecture and Geospatial Data Sciences), Kaija Windeler (Master’s Student in Environmental Policy and Planning, and Environmental Justice), and Ryan Hillyer (Master’s Student in Ecosystem Science and Management)
Indigenous Peoples all over the world face continuous barriers to land access, rooted in colonialism and systemic racism. This project supports an Indigenous community partner, the Molokai Heritage Trust (MHT) in Hawai'i, in their efforts to reclaim their ancestral lands. Through community engagement, geospatial analysis, policy research, and cultural documentation, the project will develop data-focused systems and decision frameworks that support MHT in both land acquisition and exercising self-determination. These tools aim to provide an approach to large-scale land planning that is adaptive and empowering, to be leveraged solely by the community partner organization. This decision framework can serve as a model for other Indigenous Land Restoration efforts as they seek to enhance the resilience and stewardship of their communities and ancestral lands.
Power of Refusal: Violence, Impossibility, and Agency Among Arab Women Fighters
Loay Alarab (PhD Student in Political Science)
This project examines how systemic racism operates through the colonial and imperial structures that have governed the Arab world since at least the late eighteenth century, and how racialized and gendered subjects have theorized and challenged these structures through anticolonial struggle. Focusing on the memoirs and testimonies of three Arab women fighters, Zohra Drif (Algeria), Leila Khaled (Palestine), and Souha Bechara (Lebanon), this project develops two interrelated conceptual frameworks, refusal and structured impossibility, to illuminate how racial domination reproduces itself across material, institutional, and subjective registers simultaneously. Structured impossibility names the process through which colonial and imperial powers enforce racialized limitations on dominated populations not only through dispossession and military violence but through the naturalization of political defeat, such that racialized subjects internalize the impossibility of a future without imperial control. Refusal, as theorized through these women fighters' accounts, captures how anticolonial struggle rejects the racialized logics of survivalism and resilience that colonial systems impose as the only available modes of living, expanding the horizon of what is deemed possible for dominated populations. By centering Arab women fighters as political theorists of their own condition rather than as exceptional figures or passive participants in national struggles, the project challenges the constitutive exclusion of racialized and gendered subjects from scholarly theorizations of political violence. These women navigated patriarchal domination within their own communities and political parties alongside colonial subjugation, and the forms of agency that emerged through this intersection, or capacities to action, cannot be understood through frameworks that treat racial and gendered domination as separable forces. Reading their memoirs reveals modalities of action and desire that were simultaneously shaped by and resistant to both hierarchies, offering a theory of agency attentive to how systemic racism forecloses not only material conditions but the very capacity to imagine and act beyond domination. Without this attention to the intersection of racial and gendered domination, scholarship on anticolonial struggle risks reproducing the very exclusions it seeks to analyze. I treat fighters' memoirs not as testimony to be explained, but rather as theorizations of the conditions under which systemic racism operates. This project turns to the knowledge produced by Arab women fighters precisely because their marginalization from the field is not incidental but constitutive of how political violence is understood, and undoing that marginalization opens new possibilities for thinking through anticolonial struggle and the forms of agency it engenders.
Racialized Healthcare Socialization: Understanding Black Adults' Healthcare Perceptions and Engagement Decisions
Koya Ferrell (PhD Student in Health Behavior and Health Equity)
Black adults engage with primary and preventative care at significantly lower rates than white Americans. Existing research has documented this pattern but has given insufficient attention to how healthcare-related beliefs develop, what they mean to the people who hold them, and how they are transmitted across generations and communities. Drawing on the transmission logic of racial socialization, this study uses semi-structured qualitative interviews with Black adults in southeast Michigan to examine the social sources of racialized healthcare beliefs, how those beliefs shape care-seeking decisions, and how they are transmitted to the next generation. Findings will reframe healthcare avoidance as socialization-informed coping and inform structurally accountable intervention design.
Cultivating Indigenous Critical Consciousness: Empowerment, Efficacy, and Community Connection in a Girl-Centered Program
Kelly House (PhD Student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology)
This project examines how Indigenous girls participating in the Native Girls Society describe the development of critical consciousness, empowerment, cultural connection, hope, and community efficacy within a culturally grounded, girl-centered intervention. Using longitudinal qualitative interviews, the study centers girls’ lived experiences and perspectives on support, belonging, inequality, and their sense of their ability to enact justice-oriented change. Findings will inform how community-based programming supports Indigenous girls’ sociopolitical development and guide future work on developing culturally relevant measures of critical consciousness among Native youth.
Beyond the Blueprint: ESG, Return on Use, and Accountability in Detroit’s Urban Revitalization
Dichondra Johnson (DBA Student in Business Administration)
This research develops Return on Use (ROU), a community-accountability framework that exposes how corporate ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) commitments in Detroit’s redevelopment systematically fail Black residents while generating returns for investors. Building on a 2006 MBA thesis predicting that Detroit’s recovery required authentic community partnership, this study evaluates two decades of redevelopment outcomes through longitudinal document analysis, archival research, and targeted field observation. Using Detroit (2006–2026) as the primary case and Flint as a crisis-driven comparative site, the project advances anti-racist praxis by generating community-facing ROU recommendations for organizers, policymakers, and municipal officials. Intersectionality (race × class × place) anchors the analytical framework, making visible the racialized displacement that “color-blind” ROI metrics routinely obscure.
Linguistic Racialization: Quechua Speakers in Lima, Peru
Stefania Becerra Lavado (PhD Student in Linguistic Anthropology)
My project studies how racism against Indigenous speakers functions through language in everyday interactions in Lima, the capital city of Peru. I ask: how does racism operate through the monitoring, restriction, and internalization of language use? How do Indigenous speakers navigate and contest these structures in their everyday life? Quechua is the largest Indigenous language in Peru, and there are over one million people in the capital city who speak it. Yet, they continue to encounter institutional and social marginalization, such as recent forced displacement and political violence. My goal is to foreground the narratives and everyday experiences of Quechua speakers in a context where racism is not explicitly named as such. This is essential for expanding anti-racism scholarship, as racism is present in different forms and impacts people in various ways across sociocultural spaces.
In my fieldwork, I will interact and learn from displaced and migrant Quechua speakers in one of the poorest districts of Lima, San Juan de Lurigancho. Most of them arrived in Lima fleeing the internal armed conflict as they were racially targeted, and settled in hillside migrant communities where they face extreme poverty and racial marginalization. My project shows how racism goes beyond historical events, as it still structures their lives through spatial segregation, labor precarity, and ongoing policing of their language.
Through participant observation and collaborative research with community members, I will analyze how speakers decide when to speak Quechua, when to shift to Spanish, and how they assess risks of being labeled as ‘indigenous’ or ‘serranos’; and I will show how these are shaped by memories of violence that persist in their bodies and languages. Ultimately, my project seeks to advance discussions on language justice and promote equity and recognition for Quechua speakers in Peru, while offering broader insights into anti-racist scholarship in relation to Indigeneity, displacement, and social justice.
Pathways to Healing: (Re)Imagining Culturally Grounded Aftercare Systems for Indigenous Children Experiencing Sexual Violence
Saige Porter (Master's Student in Social Work & Public Health)
When Indigenous children disclose sexual violence, the systems responsible for action--schools, child protection, healthcare, victim services, and law enforcement--often struggle to provide timely, culturally grounded support. These gaps reflect colonial governance structures that continue to produce racialized inequities in care and accountability. This project examines aftercare pathways for Lakota children, where prevention programming from the Wahwala Iyohlogya (“Peaceful Means”) initiative has revealed significant barriers to post-disclosure support. Using systems mapping, policy analysis, and program data, the study will identify structural gaps in aftercare and highlight culturally grounded approaches to healing that can inform survivor-centered institutional and policy reform.
Racial Solidarity in an Era of Mass Deportation: Resistance, Mutual Aid, and Cross-Sector Organizing
Melany Puente (Master’s Student in Public Health) and Melina Rodriguez (PhD Student in Public Health)
The study aims to document resistance strategies utilized in multi-racial solidarity movements forming to resist enforcement efforts in an era of mass deportation. Qualitative interviews will be conducted in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis to determine mechanisms that lead to successful strategies and assess the physical and mental health costs to the organizers, responders, and community members who engage in these resistance strategies.
A Report on the State of Underserved Farmers in Michigan
Luna Hammer (Master’s Student in Environmental Justice), Willow Vowler (Master's Student in Environmental Justice), Shameem Bano (Master’s Student in Development and Sustainability and MBA), and Victoria Moore (Master's in Environmental Justice and Environmental Policy and Planning)
In partnership with the Multicultural Food Sovereignty Network, we are focusing on the state of underserved BIPOC farmers in Michigan through mixed methods and community engagement. We combine a statewide survey, focus group discussions, and policy and historical analyses to document structural barriers in land access, capital, and markets. The project will generate a comprehensive report, policy brief, data dashboard, and community summary that centers racial, food, and climate justice, equipping farmers, advocates, and policymakers with tools to advance equitable, anti-racist agricultural systems and build social networks among underserved farmers.
Harvesting Opportunity: Agrivoltaics as a Pathway to Land Access and Generational Wealth Project
Annie Droelle (Master’s Student in Environmental Justice), Cameron Kaufman (Master’s Student in Environmental Justice and Behavior, Education, and Communication), Selma Barboza-Campos (Master’s Student in Ecosystem Science and Management), Payrav Dehqonov (Master’s Student in Sustainability and Development and Sustainable Systems), Jesse Evers (Master’s Student in Environmental Policy and Planning)
Agrivoltaics, the practice of combining solar energy production with agriculture, has emerged as a promising approach to reduce land use conflicts while allowing farms to remain productive. However, participation in agrivoltaics remains uneven. Structural barriers in financing, contracting practices, and insurance standards often limit access for smaller producers, raising questions about energy justice and who benefits from the renewable energy transition. The HARVEST Project examines how the logistics of solar development, including vegetation management, site design, lease structures, and insurance frameworks, shape land access and economic opportunities for historically excluded farmers, particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) producers.
Racialized Institutional Response and Youth Sex Trafficking Reporting: Developing a Measure of Anticipated Institutional Consequences
Renee Sahatdjian (Master's Student in Public Policy)
This project develops and pilot tests a trafficking-specific measure of anticipated institutional consequences of reporting among high school youth. Although schools play a key role in identifying and responding to sex trafficking, prevention research lacks tools to measure how youth anticipate institutional responses. Drawing on scholarship on racialized institutional governance, the study examines whether anticipated institutional consequences vary across racial and intersecting identities and shape trafficking-related bystander intentions. By identifying whether racially minoritized youth anticipate punitive responses such as discipline, disbelief, or law enforcement involvement when reporting trafficking, the project generates evidence to inform more equitable prevention and reporting practices.
Toward Intellectual Diversity and Innovation: An Experiment to Identify Belief- and Attitude-Based Predictors of Faculty Epistemic Exclusion
Chih-An Bian (PhD Student in Personality and Social Context Psychology)
Systemic racism in the academy is supported by epistemic exclusion, the systematic denial of minoritized scholars’ claim to knowledge and its production. The proposed study examines the psychological beliefs and attitudes of those engaging in epistemic exclusion. Using a 4x2 between-subjects online experimental design, 1,600 U.S. faculty from natural and social sciences will be randomly assigned to evaluate a hypothetical research program that varies the type of scholarship and the scholar’s identity. Findings will reveal the mechanisms through which epistemic exclusion is perpetuated and provide insights for interventions to reduce this form of structural racism in the academy.
Radical Hope Under Sociopolitical Stress: Pathways to Cross-Racial/Ethnic Solidarity and Activism Among Communities of Color
Rouan Salim (PhD Student in Psychology)
Racism operates through multiple systems and institutions, resulting in chronic discrimination and cumulative racialized harm for communities of color. This dissertation tests a path model examining whether Palestinian context-specific trauma (PCST) and discrimination predict cross-racial/ethnic solidarity and activism behavior among communities of color in the United States. Guided by the Cumulative Racial–Ethnic Trauma Model (Awad et al., 2019) and a cross-racial/ethnic solidarity framework (Demanarig et al., 2024), this model tests radical hope as a mediator and racial centrality as a moderator.
Equitable Innovation: Responsible Tech Governance Through Environmental Justice and Indigenous Frameworks
Saima Rashid (Master's Student in Public Policy and Environment and Sustainability)
My master’s practicum is an applied, interdisciplinary research project in partnership with the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment and the Midwest Environmental Justice Network. Using the Saline Data Center as a case study, it aims to investigate data-center impacts on intersectionally vulnerable communities in the Great Lakes region and empower them to shape policy that advances social and racial equity. Using geospatial mapping, I will devise an evaluation matrix for measuring economic, social, political, and environmental impacts and interview EJ leaders and community members to inform a roadmap for EJ-framework integration into data-center governance.
Do LLMs systematically discourage certain social groups from accessing welfare benefits?
Rui Long (Master’s Student in Public Policy) and Tongyao Li (Master’s Student in Public Policy)
To effectively examine the potential racism in large language models (LLMs) in public welfare access, this study selects ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity as testing platforms and designs user profiles with different characteristics to interact with these AI chatbots. These human–AI dialogues all focus on how to apply for or maintain Medicaid as an American citizen. This research aims to identify the potential biases and equity issues embedded in LLMs, prompt reflection on the role of LLMs in facilitating access to social benefits, and provide guidance for integrating LLMs into public service systems in the future.