2021-22 CHAS Occasional Speaker Series
March 31, 2022: Adriano Udani
Adriano Udani is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Public Policy Administration Program at University of Missouri, St. Louis (UMSL). He serves as the Research Advisor for UMSL’s Community Innovation and Action Center and as principal investigator on the Luce Foundation funded project, “The Pursuit of Dignity: Honoring Intellect Among Asylum Seekers.”
Currently partnering with immigration attorneys and grassroots advocacy groups in St. Louis, Adriano works with Central American and Mexican asylum seekers to create a process that educates, accompanies, pays, and positions asylum seekers as policy leaders and knowledge producers to abolish any and all forms of detention. This work has led to other projects that center equity and reciprocity in research collaborations with community health workers and U.S. citizens who have contact with criminal justice institutions.
Adriano specializes in the study of mass political attitudes toward immigrants and migrant communities as well as the local impact of detention and surveillance. His research is published in peer-reviewed social science journals in public administration, public policy, public opinion, state and local politics, and in race and identity studies. He recently co-authored, “Looking in a mirror: Asylum in the United States as a reflection of white supremacy.”
Adriano earned a PhD in Political Science from the University of Minnesota, a Masters of Public Affairs from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Science from Northwestern University.
March 9, 2022: Uma Jayakumar
Uma Jayakumar is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at University of California, Riverside. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of San Francisco, where she cofounded a Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) master’s program with a mission of transforming organizational environments toward increasing racial diversity, justice, and inclusion. She received her doctorate in Higher Education and Organizational Change from UCLA and served as Faculty Associate at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Jayakumar’s scholarship and teaching address racial justice and policy issues in higher education, with a focus on how institutional environments such as campus climates and cultures shape college access and outcomes and how students experience and resist barriers to inclusive engagement. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Center for Institutional Diversity, the National Academy of Education/Spencer, and the Ford Foundation. In 2021, the American Educational Research Association (AERA, Division G) recognized her contributions with the Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education.
Notably, Jayakumar was one of twenty-one social science researchers who co-developed amicus briefs summarizing key research findings related to the use of race-conscious admissions practices, in the two most recent federal affirmative action cases. The briefs, submitted to The Supreme Court by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, supported the need for race-conscious admissions and diversity/inclusion in Higher Education Institutions. She was an expert witness in the SFFA v UNC affirmative action case, representing the student of color intervenors, in a case that they won, now slotted to be heard by the Supreme Court.
Jayakumar recently co-authored “Why Are All the White Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: Toward Challenging Constructions of a Persecuted White Collective.”
January 25, 2022: Jared Loggins
Jared Loggins is visiting assistant professor of Black studies and political science at Amherst College. His research and teaching agenda is broadly interested in twentieth-century black political thought. His remembrance of Charles Mills, “The House That Charles Built,” was one of the twenty most-read articles on Dissent in 2021.
Loggins is co-author, with Andrew Douglas, of Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (2021, UGA Press). The two also co-authored an essay on “The Lost Promise of Black Study” for the Boston Review.
Loggins is working on another book project, tentatively titled “Darkwater Insurgencies: The Political Aesthetics of Freedom,” which uses Du Bois’s 1920 book Darkwater as the basis for articulating the political, social, religious, and aesthetic character of Black insurgency in the 1910s and 20s. He has work forthcoming in journals such as Political Theory and American Political Thought.
October 21, 2021: Miriam Feldblum
Miriam Feldblum is founding executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, since 2018, and most recently served as Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students at Pomona College, from 2007 to 2018. The Presidents’ Alliance Annual Impact Report for 2020 is available online. Dr. Feldblum will discuss strategies, best practices, and resources to retain and support students with immigrant, international, undocumented, refugee, or asylee status, contextualizing such efforts and initiatives within a racial equity frame.