IHP Balikan Symposium
October 17, 2025
Five faculty members named 2025 Research & Community Impact Faculty Fellows
October 22, 20252025 Graduate Anti-Racism Research Grants
October 22, 2025
19 teams of graduate students received funding
The Anti-Racism Collaborative, within the National Center for Institutional Diversity, a provost-funded initiative that ends in 2025, has awarded 19 research grants to individuals and teams comprised of University of Michigan (U-M) graduate students.
“Over the past five years, the graduate research grants have supported NCID’s mission to foster intergenerational networks of scholars,” says Elizabeth R. Cole, NCID director and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies. “I am excited that NCID gets to support these early career scholars' important and innovative work through our monthly programming, which is designed to support their professional development.”
This student-focused grant initiative aims to support research projects focused on racial inequality, racial equity, and racial justice while advancing graduate student progress toward degree. Additionally, the program provides ongoing professional development and support to the grantees.
Grant recipients include masters and doctoral students from a wide range of fields and disciplines, such as information science, anthropology, environmental justice, chemistry, and education.
"There remains great anxiety and concern about racial inequality and the capacity to overcome it," says Alford Young Jr., ARC faculty director and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Sociology, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Public Policy. "The scholars in this initiative are conducting pathbreaking and insightful research that informs about how to minimize, if not eradicate such inequality. They are producing work that meets the needs of our contemporary times."
The NCID will host opportunities for the campus and broader communities to engage with award recipients and learn more about their research during the 2025–2026 academic year.
2025 Projects
Care in Containment: The Geography of Black and Indigenous Encounters within Schooling
Anna Almore (PhD Student in the Joint Program in English and Education)
In "Care in Containment: The Geography of Black and Indigenous Encounters within Schooling", Black and Indigenous educator perspectives, histories, and stories complicate common notions of care in and beyond the classroom. Through ethnographic research, interviews, and participatory methods, this dissertation project centers the stories of Indigenous and Black educators working within reservation schools, denaturalizing and interrogating the state’s promises of care and protection at the same time it authorizes or permits violence. Ultimately, findings reveal how education practitioners, families, and students not only navigate the spatiality of school but also reclaim and exercise kinship practices — what I term deviant care — that gestures towards protection and solidarities despite the relentlessness of racialization.
National Roadmap to Ending Utility Shutoffs
Zoë Bishop (MS Student in Environmental Justice), John Blake (MS Student in Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy & Planning, and Public Policy), Melissa Lewis (MS Student in Behavior, Education, and Communication), and Bibi Macias (MS Student in Environmental Justice)
Millions of households in the United States face utility shut-offs each year, disproportionately affecting Black, Brown, Indigenous, and frontline environmental justice communities. The Energy Equity Project’s National Roadmap to Ending Utility Shutoffs seeks to address the utility shut-off crisis by documenting the harms, evaluating effective policy interventions, and developing strategic recommendations for energy justice advocates, policymakers, and regulators. Using mixed methods — including statistical analysis, policy analysis, and qualitative research — the project will assess the effectiveness of existing state and national interventions. Through stakeholder engagement with public utility commissioners, advocacy organizations, academic researchers, and directly impacted community members, we will craft a comprehensive framework to reduce and ultimately eliminate utility shut-offs. By advancing evidence-based strategies, this initiative aims to drive policy change, enhance data transparency, and promote equitable access to essential utilities nationwide.
Concretizing Care: Examining Secondary Mathematics Teachers’ Conceptualizations and Enactments of Caring for Racially Minoritized Students
Karin Brown (PhD Candidate in Educational Studies with a concentration in Mathematics Education)
Too many students of color in US schools have negative mathematical learning experiences. However, mathematics teachers can facilitate more positive learning environments for these populations through caring. Prior research on mathematics teachers’ caring for students of color has tended to describe teachers’ practices in relatively general ways. In contrast, this study provides detailed descriptions of teachers’ caring. Participants are four white women mathematics teachers nominated by their principal for successful work with students of color. Findings will strengthen teacher educators’ and classroom teachers’ knowledge of caring for racially minoritized students, which could contribute to more positive mathematical learning experiences for these populations.
Interpretation and (Repair)ation: Heritage Narratives as a Method of Activism and Veneration in Historically Black Spaces
Ashani Coviello (PhD Student in Anthropology)
Within historically Black spaces, particularly those along the US South, marked by the ghosts of slavery, racial commodification, and racial displacement work in tandem. Cities like Charleston and New Orleans are abound with a paradoxical landscape of urban development and plantation tourism, with institutions guiding the way in which images of the past are rendered. Yet the stories and experiences of generational locals offer a counter to the romanticized accounts of the mainstream hospitality sector. This research project proposes a study of the heritage interpretation work that is currently being led by local tour guides and museum natives engaged in the preservation of southern Black neighborhoods, in order to identify the methods of activism that are being employed to counter gentrification, erasure, and anti Black institutional language. Through this study, these strategies are examined in the context of heritage interpretation and reclamation practices, as well as cultural tourism reform within these spaces, specifically those along the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Imagining the insider networks of these interpretationists as a practice of guerrilla activism presents an interruption of the ideologies undergirding the erasure of the contributions and ancestral experiences of Black residents. Theoretically grounded in a convergence of language ecology and abolition ecology, this project considers how justice and community well-being is achieved through the mobilization of narrative traditions. Through the use of interdisciplinary methods such as ethnographic observation, archival analysis, and walking tour interviews, this project considers how interpretive work may serve as methodology used to address harm, trauma, and affliction in Black neighborhoods.
The Black Women & Pleasure Project: The Meanings of Pleasure in Contemporary Black American Women’s Everyday Lives
Maya Glenn (PhD Candidate in Sociology)
Beyond the academy, Black women are having public conversations about pleasure. Social theorists have long examined what pleasure is and the roles it plays in society. However, there’s yet to be a social science study that investigates how well these theories align with how Black women make meaning of their everyday experiences of pleasure. Research also shows that sexual identity shapes people’s access to different kinds of pleasure. Building on this, this study draws on journal entries and interviews with 60 Black women, across the sexual identity spectrum, to compare their understandings, sources, and uses of pleasure in daily life. By deepening our understanding of how race, gender, and sexual identity shape Black women’s access to life-affirming pleasure, this work can inform future social justice efforts to expand that access and move us closer to a racially just society.
The Meds and Eds City: Land, Labor, and the Politics of the “Public Good” in Boston, 1960–2005
Daniel Jin (PhD Candidate in American Culture)
No longer secluded “ivory towers,” urban universities have become major employers and developers in their surrounding communities. Tracing the historical evolution of university-community relationships in three Boston neighborhoods over the second half of the twentieth century, I explore how residents of Chinatown, Columbia Point, and Mission Hill contended with the growth of the “meds and eds” economy. While administrators tended to endorse land use and labor practices that widened racial inequalities, residents built powerful movements through which they worked to meet the educational, economic, housing, and health needs of communities of color. Through recounting these histories, I aim to offer a usable past for envisioning environmental, social, spatial, and workplace justice today.
African Belonging and the Racial Geographies of Detroit
Abdul Kizito (PhD Student in Anthropology)
African migrants in the United States navigate a complex racial landscape where they are incorporated into the category of Blackness while also negotiating distinct experiences of migration, racialization, and belonging. My doctoral research investigates how African migrants in Detroit engage with Blackness in a city historically shaped by Black political struggle, Pan-Africanist organizing, and shifting racial and economic geographies. As anti-immigration sentiment and white Christian nationalism intensify, the experiences of Black non-citizens raise critical questions about racial solidarity, exclusion, and political mobilization. This project examines how African migrants in Detroit negotiate Blackness, belonging, and transnational networks through sites of gendered and political labor. The key ethnographic sites include a Detroit-based African immigrant advocacy organization, a community organization focused on Detroit’s predominantly Black population, and a Senegalese braiding salon. By documenting the affective relationships cultivated in these spaces, it explores how migrants navigate racialization, economic survival, and community-building whilst sustaining transnational ties. This project contributes to broader discussions on racial justice, migration, and Black political life by foregrounding the voices and strategies of African migrants in Detroit.
A Quare Collaborative Ethnography of Black Queer & Trans Campus Life
Taylor Lewis (PhD Candidate in Higher Education)
In this quare collaborative ethnographic study, my research collaborators and I will examine how Black queer and/or trans students (BQ/TS) experience and navigate an elite, historically white university as multiple marginalized students. Furthermore, this study explores how BQ/TS draw upon quare cultural traditions to employ strategic navigational tools and techniques. Thinking with Black queer and trans theories, this research project aims to develop new embodied theories of campus life and counter-cultural, worldmaking responses to dominant cultural values from the perspectives and lived experiences of BQ/TS.
Enduring Wounds: How State Violence Shapes Political Attitudes and Health Behaviors Among Black and Latino Communities
Franshelly Martinez-Ortiz (PhD Student in Public Policy and Political Science)
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic introduced new challenges in ratifying new health policies and addressing misinformation on COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine hesitancy — particularly among Blacks and Latinos — largely stemmed from misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine. Many justified their vaccine avoidance by referencing historical mistreatment by the government, suggesting that these vaccines were a harmful attempt against their group (Casselman-Hontalas, Adams-Santos, & Watkins-Hayes, 2024). Black and Latino communities in the United States have long been subjected to unethical medical practices and systemic neglect, fostering deep distrust in government institutions (Washington 2006, Sotomayor 2020). This distrust influences health behaviors and political engagement, particularly in response to public health initiatives such as the COVID-19 vaccine. In this project, I aim to investigate how exposure to harmful health policies and medical exploitation increases cynicism toward state institutions, leading to conspiratorial beliefs about health initiatives and lower vaccine uptake among Black and Latino communities. I predict that familiarity with and proximity to historical state violence heightens political cynicism, which then predicts greater engagement in conspiracy thinking and reduced compliance with public health measures. This research seeks to uncover how the trauma of state violence shapes health behaviors and engagement with state actors with implications for rebuilding trust in public health initiatives.
Love Unseen: Measuring Young Adults’ Self-Perceptions and Attitudes Regarding Desirability in Dating Contexts
Mel Monier (PhD Candidate in Communication and Media), Jasmine Banks (PhD Candidate in Psychology), Erykah Benson (PhD Candidate in Sociology), and Janae W. Sayler (PhD Candidate in Psychology)
This project aims to explore the broader social impacts of online dating in two ways: first, by understanding how college-aged young adults are engaging in online dating practices; and second through illuminating how ideologies about perceived desirability, informed by race, body size, and attractiveness (among other factors) are reproduced and maintained in online dating spaces. Through simulating “blind dates” (in which the partners are matched based on compatibility measured through a pre-screening survey but are unable to see each other) in a controlled setting with college students we aim to observe the ways in which these assumptions about race and bodies, and in turn desirability, impact perceived compatibility among potential partners. We argue that as online dating continues to rise in popularity, conversations about physical appearance and “personal preference” (a term often used to disguise racism and fetishization) which are facilitated and even encouraged through online dating platforms, have impacted offline dating as well. Online dating platforms are simply one space where we are able to see racism not only at work, but oftentimes normalized and even encouraged. As one of the primary ways that young adults meet potential partners, online dating platforms, we ultimately aim to draw connections between systemic racism, online dating platforms, and the ways in which these platforms impact dating culture and dating experiences more broadly.
A Structural Account of Epistemic Injustices: Reconsidering the Finniss River Land Claim (1981– )
Qian Qian Ng (PhD Student in Political Science)
Land rights are intended as a form of reparations for the frontier violence and colonial dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 is Australia’s first, and arguably remains its most effective, policy in enlarging the Indigenous estate. Despite these reparatory intentions, the land rights process has also been criticised for imposing a narrow stereotype of authenticity inherited from systemically racialized ideas about the primitive character of Indigenous peoples societies. My project explores the politics, sociology, and economics of Indigenous Australian land rights, particularly in cases of intra-Indigenous conflict. I argue the land rights process reproduces structural inequalities that hinder Indigenous claimants’ right to be known as they are, rather than as the state wants them to be: unchanging in their ‘traditional’ ways. I start from the Finniss River Land Claim (1981), a landmark case in Australian legal history that marked the first time the Australian government had to adjudicate between rival Indigenous claimants: the Maranunggu, versus the Kungarakan-Warai. Through archival and ethnographic research, I propose a structural account of epistemic injustices that sheds light on how the Anglo-Australian legal system creates unfair competition between Indigenous groups and how, despite its reparative intentions, ends up distorting claimants’ testimonies and dismissing Indigenous knowledge and traditions.
Self-Affirmations at the Intersections: An Identity-based Writing Activity with Queer & Trans Black, Indigenous, & People of Color
Lillian Nguyen (PhD Candidate in Psychology)
This project explores how identity affirmation can support the wellbeing of Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPOC), a group that often faces overlapping forms of discrimination such as racism, cisheterosexism, and other systemic barriers. While existing programs show that affirming identities can improve mental health outcomes, less is known about how these practices function at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities. To address this gap, the study will examine a feasible and accessible self-affirmation writing activity with QTBIPOC participants. Specifically, it will compare the effects of affirming individual identities (such as LGBTQ+ or BIPOC) versus intersected identities (QTBIPOC) on mental health outcomes including depression, anxiety, and somatization. By centering the experiences of QTBIPOC, this research aims to advance intersectional scholarship, highlight the role of identity affirmation in reducing psychological distress, and inform more inclusive approaches to supporting wellbeing in marginalized and/or underrepresented communities.
Racial Identity, Belonging, and Social Support: A Multi-Level Approach to Studying Institutional and State-Level Factors on Mental Health among Black College Students in the United States
Akilah Patterson (PhD Student in Public Health, Health Behavior and Health Equity)
Today, up to 40% of college students in the United States (US) present clinically significant symptoms of depression or anxiety (Healthy Minds Network, 2024). Although Black college students experience mental health challenges at similar or lower rates than their peers, over the past decade, depression has increased by 45%, and anxiety has increased by 170% among this population. (Lipson et al., 2022). This marks a significant increase in the prevalence of mental health challenges among Black students in recent years. Evidence indicates that racism and racial discrimination are related to psychological outcomes such as anxiety, depression, and racial trauma (Cooper et al., 2008; Stephens et al., 2025). While risk factors, such as stigma, have been found to exacerbate mental health challenges among Black students (Crowe et al., 2015; Goodwill & Zhou, 2020), protective factors such as racial identity, social support, and belonging buffer the effects of racism and racial discrimination, supporting positive psychological outcomes for Black college students (Lee & Barnes, 2015; McClain et al., 2016; Odafe et al., 2017; Stebleton et al., 2014). Black college students’ experiences cannot be understood in isolation, as they are shaped by broader environmental, social, and cultural contexts. However, there is a lack of research on how factors across the socioecological model (e.g., institutional, sociopolitical) relate to mental health and well-being among Black college students during this developmental epoch. Given the significant rise in mental health challenges among Black college students and the changing institutional and sociopolitical landscape, this population warrants additional study to investigate current prevalence, relevant risk and protective factors, and the institutional and structural influences affecting psychological outcomes. Using national student survey data from the Healthy Minds Study, along with institutional and state legislative data, this study will take a multilevel approach to understand the broader structural influences on Black student mental health.
Exploring the Lived Experiences of Queer-Identifying Muslims: Strategies for Ally-ship
Sadia Raza (Master's Student in Social Work)
This study examines the complex intersectionality experienced by queer-identifying Muslims through a decolonial lens. While only 106,000 US Muslims identify within the LGBTQIA+ community, this population faces multilayered marginalization and remains overlooked. Building on Rahman's identified themes faced by queer-identifying Muslims, the research will analyze self-determination practices, navigation of Western LGBTQIA+ ideals, and community-building strategies through literature review, organizational assessment, and analysis of narrative works. By examining how race, religion, and sexuality intersect in experiences of "othering," this project will enhance social work practice by developing practice recommendations that honor autonomy while addressing the unique challenges of this community.
A Mixed Methods Analysis of Implementation Factors within a Pharmacist and Community Health Worker-Led Intervention for Black and Hispanic Adults with Diabetes
Olubukola Tikare (PhD Student in Clinical Pharmacy & Translational Sciences) and Janiya Pouncy (Master’s Student in Integrated Pharmaceutical Sciences)
This study evaluates the implementation of a pharmacist and community health worker (CHW)-led intervention aimed at improving diabetes management among Black and Hispanic adults. Using a mixed-methods approach, we assess barriers and facilitators to integrating medication therapy management (MTM) and social determinants of health (SDOH) support into pharmacy workflows. Surveys and interviews with pharmacists and CHWs provide insights into feasibility, sustainability, and real-world effectiveness. Findings will inform scalable, culturally tailored diabetes care models, guide health policy, and contribute to reducing racial health disparities by optimizing pharmacist-CHW collaboration in chronic disease management.
People with History, History with People: Participatory Research with a Century-old Archive to Challenge Institutional Racism in the Colombian Chocó
Daniel Varela Corredor (PhD Candidate in Anthropology and History)
This project seeks to support a group of young Afro-Colombian students as they research the history of mining extraction in their home region of Chocó, an impoverished and racialized part of Colombia. It aims: first, to advance the cataloging of a digital archive composed of historical sources that were previously difficult for Afro-Chocoans to access. Second, to produce an illustrated booklet and a single episode podcast that offer starting points for understanding the mining history in the region. By making this archive accessible to consult, the project seeks to challenge the institutional racism that devalued Chocoans’ archives and their history.
(Re)Writing Literacy Relationships: Exploring the Intersection of Memory, Literacy Wounds, and Writing Pedagogies for Girls/Femmes of Color
Catherine Ventura (PhD Candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education)
This project begins with memory: fragments of academic literacy experiences that Girls and Femmes of Color (G/FoC) often carry in bodymindspirit (Lara, 2022), shaping their writing relationships long after these classrooms are left behind. These memories may surface as “literacy trauma” (Carvajal Regidor, 2023) or “literacy violence” (Stuckey, 1991), wounds marked by disconnection and stifled voices within colonial, racial-capitalist schooling contexts. Drawing on Morrison’s (1995) notion of rememory, this qualitative portraiture study (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) uses memory work to trace how racialized schooling wounds influence the ways in which G/FoC relate to academic writing. Through a 9-week workshop series, participants engage literacy memories, embodied writing practices, and communal pláticas (Hannegan-Martinez, 2023) to bear witness to their experiences and examine how these memories shape their current writing practices and literacy relationships. Grounded in WoC Feminisms (Anzaldúa, 2015; Dillard, 2011), trauma studies (Menakem, 2017; Haines, 2019), and healing literacies (Baker-Bell, 2020; Player & González Ybarra, 2021; Cariaga, 2019), this project builds on scholarship naming the colonial fragmentation from which racialized literacy trauma takes root and works toward pedagogies that make space for re/membering whole, nuanced literacy selves.
The Critical Multiracial Ethnic-Racial Identity Project
Victoria Vezaldenos (PhD Candidate in the Joint Program in Education and Psychology)
From childhood, Multiracial people must navigate racialized structures that were created to accommodate people with exactly one ethnic-racial identity. Because Multiracial youth do not fit neatly into these socially constructed racial categories, they may become simultaneously aware of both their racial identity and racist structures and have a unique motivation to disrupt them. Thus, I am to create a scale that measures critical Multiracial ethnic-racial identity (CMERI). The CMERI measure is an important step towards equitably addressing the lived experiences of Multiracial young people as they develop competencies to challenge the monoracist society in which they live.
Examining Racial Learning in Graduate-Level Diversity and Social Justice Social Work Education Courses
Amber Williams (PhD Candidate in Higher Education)
The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) accreditation commission filed an amendment to its recent social work accreditation policy, which states that programs must demonstrate “explicit curriculum related to antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion” that advance students’ racial consciousness and foster equitable and inclusive learning environments, in all curricular efforts (CSWE, 2022). Studies of social work education conclude that diversity and social justice competencies taught in designated and required diversity and social justice (DSJ) courses provide a means to benchmark racial learning outcomes and convey the field’s commitment to equity. However, the learning processes and effects of race-centered education approaches, including their benefits to students and society, are loosely examined and theorized in social work education studies. Using a multi-sited classroom ethnography, this study explores how graduate-level DSJ courses that include antiracist pedagogies promote students’ racial learning and, potentially, their development of racial consciousness. By examining graduate students’ learning in the social work context, this study contributes to graduate education scholarship on the role of race education and liberatory pedagogies in students’ professionalization.