FAJI 2026 Awardees
Scholars for Social Justice is thrilled to announce the Awardees for our Freedom and Justice Institute Research Collaborative Program. Focusing on two themes, Transforming the Jim Crow University and Radical Municipalism – our awardees will undertake research and scholarship for the purpose of strengthening and building movement infrastructures, developing analysis that can meet difficult political challenges, and honing the impact of such work on urgent issues of social and racial justice.
Texas Academic Futures Lab: Archiving Academic Repression and Supporting Education for Liberation
Dr. Sajida Jalalzai (Institute for Diversity and Civil Life), Dr. Sarah Beth Kaufman and Dr. Habiba Noor (Trinity University)
This project convenes faculty, students, and staff in Texas who have been deemed risks to their universities for exercising academic freedom concerning “controversial” subjects. Through the creation of a collective digital archive, we preserve these experiences, identify patterns of academic repression and resistance, and collectively imagine a liberated academic future within and beyond universities.
The Archive of Anarchisms, Abolition, & Anti-Imperialism
Dr. Rachel McMillian (Indiana University Indianapolis), Reginald BoClair (University Without Walls and the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project) & Dr. Sabina Vaught (University of Pittsburgh)
Collaboratively designed through non-hierarchical study relations across two prison intellectual hubs, this project’s seminar series will undertake the creation of a multi-modal archive to serve as a sustainable, autonomous, pliable architecture of dynamic pedagogical, curricular Black liberation work.
Red Cities, White Coats, and Blue Power: Toward A New Practice of Urban Community Safety
Dr. Alex S. Vitale (Brooklyn College), Dr. Stuart Schrader (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. Philip V. McHarris (University of Rochester)
In partnership with the national police abolition network Building Beyond Policing, this project proposes to investigate emergent alternatives to police for achieving public safety, asking how they light a pathway toward broader social transformation.
Proof in Numbers
Dr. Erin McElroy (University of Washington) & Arjun Hassard (Policy Director, Anti-Eviction Lab)
Tenant unions & associations need structured, widely-sourced evidence of housing issues – for strategy, bargaining, legal action, and municipal enforcement. Via a low-friction SMS channel, Proof in Numbers (PiN) converts anonymous tenant grievances into portfolio-wide patterns of landlord misconduct. This project rolls out PiN to tens of thousands of NYC residents in partnership with UPT, and will bring PiN to other associations, and a second city.
Transmunicipal Tenant Power: Radical Municipalism at Portfolio Scale
Dr. Richelle Brooks (Debt Collective), René Moya (Los Angeles Tenants' Union & Debt Collective) & Dr. Hannah Appel (Debt Collective & UCLA)
This project aims to make headway on the challenge corporate landlords present to tenant power through research and organizing at portfolio scale, focused on the tenants and rent debtors of the nation’s largest Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) landlord.