Five faculty members named 2025 Research & Community Impact Faculty Fellows

October 22, 2025

The Anti-Racism Research & Community Impact Faculty Fellowship provides instrumental support to early-career faculty to advance their anti-racism scholarship. Informed by ongoing discussions with anti-racism scholars at the University of Michigan, the fellowship aims to address a critical need — to successfully advance in the tenure and promotion process while concurrently supporting their efforts to utilize their expertise to fight systemic racism through policy advocacy, practice, teaching, and/or community partnerships. The fellowship provides funding to support research and public engagement that align with the aims of the initiative.

“Given the recent challenges put forth to higher education in America, many early career scholars are experiencing uncertainty and anxiety about their careers. For these scholars, early career grant support provides a crucial form of professional security and stability,” says Alford Young Jr., ARC faculty director and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Sociology, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Public Policy. “Equally importantly, this funding effort assists who are determined to make their work matter to people who are also living in uncertain and anxious times. Thus, the impact grant opportunity creates a perfect marriage between scholars who need support to get their very important work done and a public that is so desperately in need of that work being done.”

The National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) is home to a provost-funded initiative that ends in 2025 named the Anti-Racism Collaborative (ARC). The ARC is a space created to facilitate University of Michigan (U-M) community engagement around research and scholarship focused on racial inequality, racial justice, and anti-racist praxis. The ARC supports a variety of activities to catalyze innovation in research and scholarship, as well as informed practice, public engagement, and action to advance anti-racist principles and organizing.

2025 Research & Community Impact Faculty Fellows

We’re not invisible!” Exploring Refugee Young Adults’ Civic Engagement with the U.S. Political System in the Midst of Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Refugee, and Racist Sentiments

Ashley Cureton
Assistant Professor, School of Social Work and the Marsal Family School of Education (courtesy), Ann Arbor

Engaging young adults is an essential ingredient for the success of a democratic system. While a growing number of young adults understand the importance of political and civic engagement, many marginalized young adults, including newly resettled refugees, feel anxious or fearful about engaging in the U.S. political system due to an unfamiliarity with the process and the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, xenophobic, and racist climate they must navigate. Through the use of phenomenology, this exploratory study seeks to understand how refugee young adults (ages 18-34) understand and engage with the U.S. political system in spite of the toxic political climate. Moreover, this study explores the potential challenges refugee young adults face when attempting to engage in civic and political activities. In collaboration with local agencies in Washtenaw County, I will engage in in-depth, semi-structured interviews with up to 30 refugee young adults who recently resettled to the U.S. in the last five years. Implications from this study will inform institutions, such as colleges, universities, and community-based organizations, on how to encourage refugee young adults’ civic and political engagement upon resettling to the U.S. Informed by the findings, refugee young adults will have the opportunity to participate in a three-part workshop series to learn about the history of the U.S. democratic process, which is built on the systematic exclusion and suppression of communities of color and migrants; to explore their particular rights as newcomers, and to identify concrete ways for them to become active participants in the U.S. political system.

Reconceiving Watershed Resurgence: Anishinaabe Knowledge, Manoomin, and Spatial Co-Design through Two-Eyed Seeing

Gabriel Cuellar
Assistant Professor, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ann Arbor

This project proposes an Anishinaabe-centered approach to contemporary watershed management, focusing on the right relationships of manoomin/mnomin/wild rice and its human and more-than-human relatives. In the Great Lakes region, the property-driven built environment obscures Native lifeways and philosophies, particularly those concerning place-based responsibilities and the relationships between waters, lands, and the living world. This is especially true in the context of watersheds. "Reconceiving Watershed Resurgence" thus aims to support Native sovereignty and ecological knowledge through the instrument of watershed planning. Building on the significant manoomin-centered efforts underway in the region, the project contributes to the knowledge gaps identified in the Michigan Wild Rice Initiative’s guiding document, We All Live Together in a Good Way With Manoomin: Place of the Wolverine. Using the Ann Arbor Parker Brook watershed as a case study, the project engages tribal representatives, landowners, institutions, local governments, and faculty collaborators to co-produce 1) a watershed land use analysis method and 2) a spatial design framework that catalyzes watershed-based reparative relationships. The framework — which will be distributed to the community of manoomin stewards and watershed councils throughout Michigan — will identify how environmental management and urban design practices can incorporate Anishinaabe perspectives and foster collective land/water/life relationships around manoomin. This will ultimately contribute to reconceiving and rehabilitating Native and non-Native relationships with the land we share and dismantling the systems behind environmental racism in Michigan.

Addressing Anti-Black Linguistic Racism: The Role of Message Framing in Shaping Early Childhood Educators’ Perceptions about African American English

Nicole Gardner-Neblett
Assistant Professor, Psychology, Ann Arbor

The project investigates the effectiveness of informational messaging (i.e., message framing) about African American English (AAE) as a tool to dismantle anti-Black linguistic racism among educators of young children. Early school experiences with anti-Black linguistic racism can have enduring and harmful effects on children’s academic success and well-being. By testing which messages are most effective in shaping educators’ beliefs and practices related to AAE, the study aims to promote more equitable and affirming early learning environments. Early childhood educators across the United States are recruited through social media campaigns to participate. Using an online survey, educators are randomly assigned to view one of three informational video messages that present similar content but differ in framing: gain-framed (emphasizing benefits of supporting AAE), loss-framed (emphasizing costs of not supporting AAE), or neutral (providing information without framing). Surveys and open-ended responses assess educators’ knowledge, beliefs, and classroom practices relevant to AAE before and after viewing to identify immediate changes, and again three months later to determine whether shifts are sustained. Results will reveal which message framing strategy is most effective in strengthening educators’ awareness and classroom support for AAE. By identifying approaches that sustain positive changes in beliefs and practices over time, the findings will inform professional development and policy efforts that help dismantle anti-Black linguistic racism and ensure that all children’s language strengths are recognized and nurtured.

VANTAGE: Vietnamese American Narratives to Transform Anti-Racist Grassroots Empowerment

James Huynh
Assistant Professor, School of Public Health, Ann Arbor

Vietnamese Americans, the fourth-largest Asian ethnic group in the U.S., remain structurally erased from public health research, resulting in a critical lack of data on their health, social, and economic conditions. This data invisibility, a product of structural racism, limits the ability to develop policies and resources that address Vietnamese communities’ specific needs. The Vietnamese American Narratives to Transform Anti-Racist Grassroots Empowerment (VANTAGE) project seeks to conduct a bilingual Vietnamese and English community needs assessment of Vietnamese Americans in Michigan. In partnership with the Michigan Chapter of PIVOT (the Progressive Vietnamese American Network) and the Kinship, Intersectionality, Transformative Health (KITH) Lab, this project uses community-partnered, anti-racist research methods to investigate the health, social, economic, and policy needs of Vietnamese immigrants, refugees, and their children. Grounded in Critical Refugee Studies and Public Health Critical Race Praxis, the study will collect qualitative and quantitative data through key informant interviews, focus groups, and a mixed-mode survey. Findings will be analyzed within a framework that situates health inequities within broader histories of U.S. militarism, racial capitalism, and exclusionary migration policies. The findings will directly inform advocacy efforts, resource allocation, and policy-making at the local and state levels. Through bilingual dissemination, participatory analysis, and coalition-building, the VANTAGE project aims to build power in Vietnamese American communities in Michigan.

Empowering Change: Youth Leadership and Antiracist Pedagogies in Transforming Urban Education for Black Students

Vanessa Louis
Clinical Assistant Professor, Marsal School of Education, Ann Arbor

This study proposes to transform the Youth Leadership Council (YLC) within the Detroit River Story Lab (DRSL) project into a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) model. This initiative aims to empower young leaders through intentional programming, leadership development, and community engagement. Guided by research questions investigating the role of YLC in community initiatives and curriculum development, the study aligns with antiracist pedagogies, specifically Freire’s (1970) concept of conscientization, to foster critical consciousness among participants. Employing YPAR methodology, the study involves youth co-researchers in collecting and analyzing narrative and qualitative data, and conducting focus group interviews. By amplifying the voices and experiences of Detroit’s youth, the project seeks to transform educational programs and challenge the inequitable systems that hinder their success.