The UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy

LAST CHANCE – The Social Justice Initiative is hiring a part-time Administrative/Secretarial Assistant.

Applications close 8/7/24 - Apply via Handshake – Job #: 9134299

SJI is looking for an Administrative Assistant with an eye for detail to help the team with various tasks related to planning the Through the Portal national conference exploring issues of social justice. This will be a one-of-a-kind opportunity for a student to be part of the organizing team of a historical national conference.

- Undergraduate Juniors & Seniors
- Pay Rate: $15.40–17.60/hr
- Previous administrative and clerical experience required.
- Part-time: 20 hours a week (between 8/1 to 10/4)
- Hybrid, based in Chicago (on-campus)

2024 Schedule • Socialism 2024 Socialism 2024 is a four-day conference featuring dozens of panels, lectures, and workshops organized by groups from all over the country.

A Black Woman's Guide to Getting Free urges Black women everywhere to choose themselves, and choose freedom, in a world that would have you chained.

🎧https://highbridgeaudio.com/blackwomansguidetogettingfree.html
Performed by Ozzie Jacobs


Tamara Winfrey Harris

Join IRRPP and co-sponsors Black Studies, Sociology, and Global Asian Studies for an online conversation with UC Irvine Professor Claire Jean Kim about her third book, Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, which provides a theoretically provocative analysis of how we must consider both anti-Blackness and white supremacy — and the articulation of the two forces — in order to understand U.S. racial dynamics and where Asian Americans fit into the racial order. Register here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/events/claire-jean-kim/
UIC Global Asian Studies Program
Black Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago

Meet our Post Doctoral Research Associate, Kaitlin Devaney. Dr. Devaney received her Ph.D. with distinction and her M.A. in Criminology, Law and Justice with a concentration in Violence Studies from the University of Illinois Chicago. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago, where she double-majored in Public Policy and Latin American Studies and played basketball.

Dr. Devaney’s research lies broadly in neighborhood-level violence, community-level anti-violence strategies, critical race studies and comparative racialization, and outsider qualitative methodology. Her dissertation research, Death by Abandonment: Understanding North Lawndale’s Historically High Homicide Rate, explored the intersection of neighborhood violence and critical theories of race and violence. She is currently engaged in work that explores the drill rap subculture of violence in Chicago and evaluative prison education research on Northwestern’s Prison Education Program, where she did her postdoctoral research fellowship.

Read more about her here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/profiles/kaitlin-devaney/

Meet our Senior Research Specialist, Matthew Rodriguez. Matthew Rodriguez is a teacher. In his nearly two decades of experience in education, he began as a janitor in a small alternative high school, transitioned to be a math tutor, then began teaching Math and Social Studies. He became a teacher leader, then an Assistant Principal, and ultimately was the principal for seven years in the same school in the Humboldt Park Community of Chicago. There he learned that education is, for many of our youth, the difference between life or death. In this context, the imperative nature of education captured his imagination and frames how he continues to prepare leaders in schools today.

Matthew transitioned from the high school setting to a national role in designing and implementing curriculum to support educational leaders to have the highest impact with their student populations before he transitioned back to Chicago to become the Chief Education Officer of a small district. He has now returned to preparing school leaders through his work at the Equity Imperative.

Read more about him here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/profiles/rodriguez-matthew/

Register for Socialism 2024 Socialism 2024 is a four-day conference featuring dozens of panels, lectures, and workshops organized by groups from all over the country.

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Kate Zinsser. Dr. Zinsser's project, "Systematic Review & Needs Assessment of Early Expulsion Prevention Trainings," For four years, Dr. Zinsser has collaborated with Illinois advocates and policymakers to evaluate the implementation of Illinois’ progressive ban on early childhood expulsion. Despite advocates’ efforts, their research shows that children are still pushed out and excluded from care, and these children tend to be boys, Black and have diagnosed or suspected disabilities. The Illinois coalition was recently selected to receive (unfunded) technical assistance from a national organization targeting expulsion prevention policies. In applying for technical assistance, coalition members identified the need to understand whether available training for early educators aligns with those stipulated in the legislative ban, including training related to implicit bias and trauma-informed care. Funding for this project will support this continued partnership and our ability to conduct a systematic review of training related to expulsion prevention. Findings will directly inform state investments in training development and improved accessibility, contributors to reducing rates and disparities in expulsion https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. April Jackson. Dr. Jackson's project, "Rebuilding Berwyn, Revisioning Cermak Road," explores a plan-making approach centered upon first identifying and bringing together and then actually engaging place-based Latinx communities in culturally appropriate co-design work of common public spaces. Expanded coalition building efforts will help foster bottom-up community engagement practices and ensure that the growing Latinx community in Berwyn remains an integral part of design and development processes ensuring existing residents and businesses can stay and benefit from neighborhood improvements.
Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Andy Clarno. Dr. Clarno's project, "Policing in Chicago Research Group: A New Beginning," rebuilds the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), a community-engaged collective of UIC graduate students that provides research support to social movements mobilizing against racialized policing.
Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Sarah Ullman. Dr. Ullman's project, "African American and Latinx Women’s Recovery from Interpersonal and Community Violence in Chicago" examines data on Chicago-area African American and Latinx r**e survivors (N=836) to enhance policy-relevant knowledge of community-level factors and how services and intervention can be adapted to meet their needs. Data will be used to: a) educate formal support providers about African American and Latinx survivors’ needs and b) inform the development of an informal support intervention to enhance recovery and access to care.

Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Sabrin Rizk. Dr. Rizk's project, "Childcare Access to Health and Developmental Screenings in US Children 0-5 Years Old" leverages the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education to predict the likelihood of access to health and developmental screening in center-based child care and early education settings, as a function of young children’s race/ethnicity and program-level factors.pipeline and support transitions to the physician workforce pathway.

Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Nicole Perez. Dr. Perez' project, "Investigating Community Cultural Wealth Among Latinx Medical Students and Trainees," explores the various forms of capital defined by community cultural wealth — aspirational capital, familial capital, linguistic capital, resistant capital, social capital, and navigational capital — that may serve as a collective set of protective factors that keep Latinx medical students and trainees in the medical education pipeline and support transitions to the physician workforce pathway.

Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Mahesh Somashekhar. Dr. Somashekhar's project, "The Gentrification of White Neighborhoods and the Residential Mobility of White Displaces", examines the characteristics of White neighborhoods that gentrify as well as the spatial mobility patterns of White people displaced by gentrification. Through comparative research on White and non-White displacees, practitioners can learn whether housing policies designed to support displacees should be race-based, class-based, or both.

Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Lilia Fernandez. Dr. Fernandez' project, "Race, Class, and Labor: The Historical Role of Chicago’s Latino Workers during Deindustrialization", seeks to illuminate the role Latino workers have played in Chicago and surrounding suburbs in the late 20th century, particularly vis-à-vis white, African American, and other immigrant workers.

Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Kate Lowe. Dr. Lowe's project, "Race, Travel Time, and Quality Job Access in Chicagoland: Comparing Models of Job Accessibility with Actual Commuting Burden",compares models of job accessibility with actual commuting patterns, theorizing that race explains where predicted high job access does not actually align with quality job access and reasonable commutes — instead resulting in racially disparate onerous, time-consuming commutes.

Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

News Alert: Iván Arenas, an author of the report said, “A history of racist policies and laws and social discrimination have dramatically favored white people, leaving Black people with a lack of resources. The report outlines how structural factors such as the lack of affordable housing, evictions, incarceration, unemployment, health care access and aging out of foster care often pushed black residents in Illinois toward homelessness. The same factors don't affect white residents as much leading to the racial disparities and homelessness we see in our state,” he said.

Read the full article here: https://www.nprillinois.org/2024-05-13/a-wide-racial-disparity-between-homeless-black-and-white-people-comes-as-no-surprise-to-springfields-black-lives-matter-group

Read the full report here: https://uofi.app.box.com/s/owosqr7f4pp3y5csxx4cszymwtk0n1gs

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Daysi Diaz-Strong. Dr. Diaz Strong's project, The Life Course Implications of Legal Exclusion and Gender Oppression, examines how legal exclusion and gender oppression intersect and change along the life course of undocumented Latinas in the Chicago metropolitan area.

Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. David Stovall. Dr. Stovall's project, Abolitionist Visions of ‘School’: Slavery, Prison and the End of the Schooling Industrial Complex, examines the carceral connections of enslavement to public ‘schooling. Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. David Ansari. Dr. Ansari's project, Enactments of Origins: What Psychotherapy for Immigrants and Refugees Reveals about Evolving Debates on Belonging in France, examines how recent movements and debates have affected the psychother**eutic practice within these mental health services. Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Dr. Atef Said. Dr. Said's project, Beyond Digital Democracy and Digital Repression: Arab Political Subjectivities in the Age of Algorithms, interrogates what the potentials and limitations of digitized subjectivities in the Arab world are to organize for democracy in the context of curtailing algorithmic political spaces. Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

Meet our 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Alexandra Filindra. Dr. Filindra's project, Dying to Serve You: The Causes and Consequences of Threats Against Elected Officials, brings to light, contextualizes, and interrogates the many facets of political harassment, threats, and violence as experienced by the country’s elected officials and their staff. Read more here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/research-2/faculty-fellows/

We will showcase our 2023-24 Faculty fellows in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

IRRPP provides funding to UIC faculty members who conduct engaged and policy-relevant research on race and ethnicity. Faculty Fellows are awarded course releases or grants that cover research costs. Policy and Social Engagement Fellows are awarded grants for projects working with partners on a community action project.

Meet our undergraduate office/research assistant, Ellison Radek. Ellison is a third-year undergraduate at the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. They are studying Public Policy and minoring in Black Studies and Urban Studies. As a student with lived experience, Ellison is passionate about restorative justice and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline and works to fight for policy changes both in and outside of the carceral system.

Since arriving in Chicago, she has volunteered with Chicago Votes’ Unlock Civics initiative at Cook County Jail, registering incarcerated community members to vote. Prior to her work at IRRPP, Ellison served as a Policy Intern for the Justice, Equity, and Opportunity Initiative in the Office of the Lt. Governor and currently works as a Youth Advocate for the Cannabis Equity IL Coalition. Looking ahead, Ellison hopes to pursue a career in reentry, centering racial justice, abolition, and healing in spaces where both interpersonal and systemic harm have been caused.

Read more about her here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/profiles/radek-ellison/

Meet our graduate research assistant, Victoria Isaac. Victoria is a graduate student in Sociology and a Pipeline to an Inclusive Faculty (PIF) fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Her research interests encompass race, religion, education, and public space. Victoria explores processes of race-making within the Black American community, the co-constitution of race and religion, and how Black Americans advocate for and claim belonging within educational and religious spaces.

Her projects have explored the association between arts education and student achievement and attainment for Black and Latinx students, the different ways students across racial groups avoid discussions of race at Christian colleges, and the impact of places of worship on crime rates within Milwaukee neighborhoods, particularly within predominantly Black neighborhoods. As a dancer and dance educator, Victoria’s artistic practice is rooted in the philosophy that creative expression has continuously served as a site for reimagining societal systems and fueling community, both necessary for the liberation of all marginalized groups. She previously earned her Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in Dance and Sociology and her Master of Arts degree in Sociology, both from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Victoria is an alum of the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program. Read more about her here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/profiles/isaac-victoria/

Meet our graduate research assistant, Nancy Toure. Nancy is a graduate student in Sociology whose research focuses on unraveling the mechanisms perpetuating racial inequality within federal agency structures. This endeavor became the cornerstone of her academic journey, driving her to explore the intricate web of organizational structures and their impact on societal disparities.

Beyond academia, she envisions developing innovative survey tools capable of capturing employees' experiences of inequality across diverse work sectors. These tools can serve as diagnostic instruments for identifying and rectifying inequities within organizational structures, fostering a more equitable society.

Read more about her here: irrpp.uic.edu/profiles/toure-nancy/

This Friday! The Chicagoland chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network and UIC's Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy are excited to host an in-person OpEd writing workshop for all interested researchers in the Chicago area. Chicago Tribune editorial page editor Chris Jones will be joining the workshop to share his expertise and insight into publishing OpEds. Chris will also take questions from participants. Register here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/news-stories/policy-brief-writing-2/

Meet our graduate research assistant, Ni'Shele Jackson. Ni'Shele is a graduate student in sociology whose research entails interrogating how race, gender, and class hierarchies get culturally and materially reproduced through notions of health and weight. As a mixed methods scholar, they employ both qualitative and quantitative methods such as interviewing, ethnography, and surveys to answer these questions. The overarching goal of their research is to give insight into ways we can create more just, communal, and empowering visions of embodied health and health programs. They have a B.A. in American Studies from Wellesley College. Read more about them here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/profiles/nishelle-jackson/

WTTW Chicago featured our new report, published in collaboration with state officials, which found that Black Illinoisans are almost eight times more likely to experience homelessness compared to their White counterparts. Our GRA, Aisha Lehman, also one of the report's authors, was featured on WTTW Chicago Black Voices.

Watch the segment here: https://video.wttw.com/video/black-illinoisans-more-likely-to-become-homeless-report-ddcae9/
Read the full report here: tinyurl.com/illinoisblackhomelessness
Chicago Housing Authority
WTTW - Chicago PBS
Illinois Department of Human Services
Phoenix Foundation NFP

Meet our graduate research assistant, Aïsha Lehmann. Aïsha is a graduate student in Sociology. Prior to her graduate studies, Aïsha received a BFA in Studio Art with minors in Sociology and Africana Studies at Brigham Young University. Her research interests include racial identity formation and categorization, particularly their ability to shape resource allocation and mobility. She recently conducted research for the Illinois Racial Equity Report on Black Homelessness. Aïsha continues her art practice as an alternative engagement with her research interests, visualizing the individual and the systemic through metaphor. Read more about her here: https://irrpp.uic.edu/profiles/lehmann-aisha/