CRJ Faculty Affiliates Program

Dr. Sara Awartani is an LSA Collegiate Fellow (2022-2024) and an incoming Assistant Professor (2024) in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining Michigan, she was a Global American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and a Lecturer on Harvard’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights.

Dr. Christian Davenport is the Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen Professor of the Study of Human Understanding, Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and Elected Fellow at the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences (AAAS). Primary research interests include political conflict/violence, measurement, racism, and popular culture.

Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III is a third-generation educator, organizer, and artist committed to the lives, love, and liberation of everyday Black people. He serves as an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education and Director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, advises graduate students, and supervises graduate research. Dr. Davis is engaged in an active ethnographic research program concerned with understanding the racialized consequences of higher education on society, including the ways campus and community organizers collaboratively resist university expansion, urban renewal, and the institution of policing.

Dr. Arnold K. Ho is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Ho’s research has examined how our social and political attitudes affect the way we perceive the world, with consequences for prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. He is currently interested in the ecological and evolutionary origins of our political attitudes.

Dr. Vincent L. Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. In 2020, he was also appointed as a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Hutchings conducts research and teaches courses in Black politics, American public opinion and voting behavior, and racial attitudes.

Dr. Paula Lantz is the James B. Hudak Professor of Health Policy and Director of Undergraduate Programs at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She also holds appointments as University Professor of Diversity and Social Transformation and professor of health management and policy in the School of Public Health. Lantz, a social demographer/social epidemiologist, studies the role of public policy in improving population health and reducing social inequalities in health.

Dr. William D. Lopez is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and the author of the book, Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. William’s community-based research uses mixed methods to investigate the impacts of immigration raids while centering the voices of community members who survive and thrive under targeted government surveillance and removal efforts.

Dr. Roshanak Mehdipanah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health. She is also Director of the U-M Housing Solutions for Health Equity imitative focused on informs local, state, and national policy through interdisciplinary research on housing as it relates to equity in health, race, socio-economic status, and aging.

Dr. Alexandra K. Murphy, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and in the Ford School of Public Policy (by courtesy) and a Faculty Affiliate of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Murphy’s research draws on ethnographic methods to examine how poverty and inequality are experienced, structured, and reproduced.

Dr. Shobita Parthasarathy is Professor of Public Policy and Women’s and Gender Studies, and co-founder and Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at University of Michigan. Her research examines the political economy of innovation and innovation policy focusing on equity and justice, and the politics of knowledge and expertise in public policymaking. She often takes a cross-national or international perspective in her research, and has published widely on genetics and biotechnology, intellectual property, innovation policy, and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Deborah Rivas-Drake, Ph.D., is the Stephanie J. Rowley Collegiate Professor of Education and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. The overarching goal of her work is to illuminate promising practices that disrupt racism and xenophobia and help set diverse young people on trajectories of positive contribution to their schools and communities.

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan. She is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft-prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy and also wrote Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Thompson writes regularly as well on the history of policing, mass incarceration, and the current criminal justice system for myriad scholarly and popular publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker.

Dr. Megan Threats, PhD, MSLIS is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. As a health informaticist and community-based researcher, she uses anti-racist praxis and methods to investigate the existence and elucidate the magnitude of determinants of health and information inequities. Dr. Threats aims to empower marginalized communities to engage in the design and implementation of informatics interventions and consumer health technologies that combat intersecting, multi-level forms of discrimination, including but not limited to, racism, sexual orientation, and gender identity discrimination.