The Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures at Cornell University has funded seven graduate student research projects from across a wide range of fields and disciplines. Each grantee will receive dedicated support and funding from the Center to pursue innovative and creative projects that deepen academic knowledge and connect to the mission of the Center to create more just and equitable futures.

This year’s grantees are: Raul Armenta, a doctoral student in sociology; Musckaan Chauhan, a doctoral student in government; Osman Alp Cibikli, a graduate student in history; Joël Simeu Juegouo, a graduate student in literatures in English; Mariah Thompson, a doctoral student in Africana studies; Amanda Vilchez, a graduate student in communication; and Zhipeng Zhou, a doctoral student in sociology.

Graduate Student Research grantees at the Center may use this opportunity to conduct original research, support fieldwork, develop scholarly projects, and advance creative and compelling work with the potential to build knowledge useful for racial justice and social change. Grantees’ projects will also meaningfully contribute to broader conversations about structures of power, identity, belonging, labor, justice, and historical inquiry.

Jamila Michener, director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, noted that “the Center is thrilled to support this remarkable cohort of graduate students. Their projects reflect the rigorous thinking that is characteristic of Cornell research, as well as the creative risk taking that is crucial for scholarly innovation and broad social impact. With this support, they will be well positioned to make meaningful contributions to their disciplines, and to the world beyond. During a time when it is increasingly difficult to find research funding, especially for research meant to advance racial justice, we are investing in emerging scholars whose work can help us better understand inequality and more effectively chart a course towards equitable futures.”

Raul Armenta’s project, Compensatory Social Capital and Postsecondary Education in Prison, is a comparative qualitative study of how formerly incarcerated people rebuild access to social support and material resources after release. With a particular focus on postsecondary education in prison programs, the project examines whether such programs help develop “compensatory social capital”: new ties to educators, peers, alumni, advocates, service providers, and other resource-rich actors who can help repair or replace access to resources upon returning home.

Musckaan Chauhan’s project, After Independence, Before Freedom: Trinidad and Tobago and the Critique of Postcolonial Failure, examines the postcolonial political trajectory of the Anglophone Caribbean by focusing on nationalism and developmentalism during independence and its aftermath in Trinidad and Tobago. The project studies the Black Power era, including the Industrial Stabilization Act, sugar workers, the Oil Workers Trade Union, and the racial component of working-class alliance in this period.

Osman Alp Cibikli’s project, Transformations Beyond Empires: Race, Slavery, and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Red Sea Basin, 1839–1885, examines how the slave trade, European abolitionist pressure, and imperial competition transformed the nineteenth-century Red Sea basin by reshaping social and political order through the regulation of mobility. Centering the Red Sea as a transimperial historical region, the project links Ottoman, Ethiopian, European, and local actors to broader questions of abolition, race, racialization, sovereignty, and imperialism beyond the Atlantic world. 

Joël Simeu Juegouo’s project, “I Was a Question He Answered”: Black Transmasculine Subjectivity, Poetic Form, and the Politics of Collective Visibility, examines contemporary Black transmasculine poets who use lyric form to circulate multifaceted modes of Black gender subjectivity. The project considers how Black transmasculine poetry generates knowledge, how poets navigate publication and community accountability, and how literary visibility carries political stakes amid heightened trans recognition and anti-trans legislation.

Mariah Thompson’s project, Ida B. Wells: Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Justice, advances an intellectual history of Ida B. Wells that repositions her as a foundational thinker in the development of modern theories of human rights, humanitarianism, democratic governance, and justice. The project argues that Wells’ writings and political interventions constitute a sustained body of political and moral theory, using her analysis of lynching to interrogate the contradictions of modern liberal democracy, imperial order, legality, and moral legitimacy.

Amanda Vilchez’s project, Where Campesinos, Scientists and Bats Meet: Negotiating Knowledge and Advancing Epistemic Justice in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, examines collaboration between campesinos and scientists in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, where campesinos have used vampire bat guano to protect maize seeds from pathogens and support early plant growth. The project analyzes both practical communication issues and deeper epistemological challenges in this collaboration, with attention to expertise, agency, shared authority, and how farmers and scientists define success in transdisciplinary work.

Zhipeng Zhou’s project, Multidimensional Job Precarity and Racialized Job Stated-Preferences in the U.S. Labor Market, uses an online factorial survey experiment with U.S. working-age adults to examine how different dimensions of job precarity shape workers’ stated willingness to apply for and accept hypothetical jobs, intended turnover, and trust in organizations. The project conceptualizes job precarity across employment relationships, schedule predictability, access to fringe benefits, and AI displacement, and asks how evaluations and tradeoffs vary by race, ethnicity, gender, age, and education.

Graduate Student Research Grants support transformative research by equipping students to pursue bold, justice-oriented scholarship. The Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures provides resources to support innovative, creative, and compelling projects with the potential to build knowledge useful for advancing racial justice and positive social change.

Mahasti Yuanita is a writer for the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures.