Visions for a Just Future
Join us for a rich conversation with three esteemed scholars and our CRJ Visiting Fellows— Charlene Carruthers (Northwestern University), Amanda Alexander, PhD (Detroit Justice Center), and Bianca D.M. Wilson, PhD (UCLA)— whose art, scholarship, and activism expand our political imagination for transformative social change. They will be in conversation with our Founding Director & Dean of the Ford School, Dr. Celeste Watkins-Hayes. We hope you’ll join us!About our Visiting Fellows
Dr. Amanda Alexander, the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center, is a racial justice lawyer and historian who works alongside community-based movements to end mass incarceration and build thriving and inclusive cities. Originally from Michigan, Amanda has worked at the intersection of racial justice and community development in Detroit, New York, and South Africa for more than 15 years. For her catalyst project, Dr. Alexander will discuss movement lawyering and the importance of radical imagination in these times.
Charlene Carruthers is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer, and Black Studies PhD Candidate at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her work interrogates historical conjunctures of Black freedom-making post-emancipation and decolonial revolution, Black/Native/Indigenous relationalities, Black governance, and Black feminist abolitionist geographies. For her catalyst project, Carruthers will present behind the scenes photos, stills, and select clips from her short film PLENUM, which follows the journey of two siblings as they navigate the AIDS crisis at a historical Black LGBT conference.
Bianca D.M. Wilson, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs and an affiliate faculty member of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. Her research explores the relationships between culture, oppression, and health. For her catalyst project, Dr. Wilson will discuss components of her book and article project on LGBT poverty, with an emphasis on the implications of learning about different factors and pathways to poverty for LGBT subgroups.