The Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures at Cornell University has named 5 faculty fellows from across three colleges and five departments to its inaugural cohort. Each fellow will receive dedicated support and funding from the Center to pursue innovative and creative projects that stem from faculty research and teaching, and which connect to the mission of the Center to create more just and equitable futures.

This year’s fellows are: Alexander Livingston, associate professor of government in the College of Arts and Sciences; Amelia Moore, associate professor of natural resources and the environment in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Danny Parker, assistant professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Isabel M. Perera, assistant professor of government in the College of Arts and Sciences; and Jocelyn Poe, assistant professor of city and regional planning in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.

Faculty Fellows at the Center may use this opportunity to conduct original research, design community engagement initiatives, organize seminars or conferences, facilitate writing groups, create student learning opportunities, and more. Fellows’ projects will also meaningfully engage a larger community of scholars, students, and partners.

Jamila Michener, director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, noted that, “The Center is thrilled to play our role in supporting this brilliant constellation of Cornell faculty. Fostering deeper intellectual community is a core part of the work we do as a research institution. Such community is the vital groundwork for creative, interdisciplinary, and impactful research—and faculty studying racism and other forms of inequality need it now more than ever.”

Alexander Livingston’s fellowship project, Tough Love: The Prophetic Politics of Martin Luther King, Jr., reexamines King as an original political thinker by placing the religious foundations of his thought at the center of his public philosophy. Resituating King’s writings on civil disobedience, economic justice, and constitutional struggle within the contexts of midcentury political theology and the practices of the Southern Black church, the book aims to unsettle the secular assumptions of contemporary political theory and highlight the enduring significance of African American religious thought for contemporary debates about freedom, equality, and dissent.

Amelia Moore will contribute to the mission to “bring together people, knowledge, and action to forge paths to a transformed future” and to further the goal of “cultivating a community of learning” by planning and convening the Just Ocean and Coastal Futures Conference for the fall of 2026. This event will bring together future-oriented scholars who integrate racial justice work with anti-racist, de- and anti-colonial practices, and other reparative frameworks into coastal and ocean studies. The purpose of the conference is to share and produce knowledge while imagining, designing, and supporting strategic action.

Danny Parker is launching the Community Voice Project, a multi-year, multi-city research program examining how structural conditions shape political beliefs and behaviors in low-income communities across different configurations of regional governance, community infrastructure, news ecologies, and demographic contexts. The project focuses especially on participants’ experiences with the criminal justice system, public assistance, access to medical care, environmental safety, and reliable information.

Isabel M. Perera will develop her next major project, Diversity and Distribution: Race, Immigration, and the Welfare State. The project systematically interrogates the popular claim that racially diverse societies cannot develop generous social benefits, hypothesizing that demography is not destiny. During her fellowship period, she will develop a new graduate seminar on this subject. Her broader aim is to learn from and foster scholarship on the relationship between political economy and racial equity.

As both Global South and Deep South leaders turn toward reparations to envision a future where economic development can heal the land and its people, Jocelyn Poe identifies opportunities to integrate reparative theories, methodologies, and strategies from across the African diaspora. Her project, Deep South Indaba: Developing Knowledge Towards a Reparative Economic Development Strategy, contributes to building a reparative praxis framework by exploring how a collaborative knowledge exchange can advance reparatory justice movements across these vastly different yet intersectional geographies.