Visiting Fellows Program

As a racial justice lawyer, historian, organizer, and writer, Dr. Amanda Alexander has dedicated her career to building the power of community-based movements for social change. She is the founder and former Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center (DJC), a movement lawyering organization working to create economic opportunities, transform the legal system, and promote equitable and just cities. While leading DJC, Amanda co-hosted and co-produced Freedom Dreams, an interview podcast that amplifies movement voices and explores the many paths to building a truly just future. Amanda is a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights and has served on the national steering committee of Law for Black Lives and the board of the James & Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. Her writing has been published in Boston Review, Yale Law & Policy Review, Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe, Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy, Howard Human & Civil Rights Law Review, and other publications. Amanda earned her JD from Yale Law School and a PhD in international and global history from Columbia University.

Charlene A. Carruthers (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer, and Black
Studies PhD candidate at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more
complete stories, her work interrogates Black governance, Black and Indigenous
relationality, and Black feminist abolitionist geographies. She is a 2020 Marguerite
Casey Presidential Freedom Scholar and Mellon Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellow in
Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her work spans more than 15 years of community
organizing across racial, gender, and economic justice movements. She is the founding national director of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), and author of the bestselling book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.

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. Bianca examines LGBTQ economic instabilities and involvement with systems of care and criminalization, with a focus on the ways racialization, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression play a role in creating disproportionality and disparities. Notably, she was the lead investigator on the first study to establish population estimates of how many LGBTQ youth are in foster care and has led similar work in juvenile criminalization. Similarly, she was the PI for a large-scale qualitative study of the life and needs of LGBTQ people experiencing economic insecurity. Underlying her substantive works on social status and wellbeing is her focus on SOGIE data policies. She has conducted SOGIE measurement research among youth and adults and continues to work collaboratively on efforts to increase and improve LGBTQ inclusive data collection. To that end, she served on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Consensus Panel on the Measurement of Sex, Gender and Sexual Orientation.