The Freedom and Justice Institute

The Freedom and Justice Institute (FAJI) aims to facilitate and support liberatory study and knowledge production by university and independent scholars whose work advances movements for freedom and justice. Under the leadership of Professors Davarian Baldwin, Cathy Cohen, Lorgia García Peña, Barbara Ransby, and Ananya Roy, with Dr. Saudi García as Executive Director, FAJI is a space of collectivity and community within, against, and beyond the confines and corporate values of institutions such as the U.S. university. There are many urgent areas of resistance and contestation in our society, but the struggle over ideas and the right to dissent, especially on college campuses, is critical as it is intimately linked to larger and global struggles.

FAJI Advisory Committee

  • Davarian Baldwin

    Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Lab at Trinity College

  • Cathy Cohen

    D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and co-founder of Scholars for Social Justice

  • Lorgia García Peña

    Professor and Director of the Program in Latino Studies at Princeton University

  • Barbara Ransby

    John D. MacArthur University Chair, and Distinguished Professor, in the Departments of Black Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at Universtity of Illinois at Chicago and co-founder of Scholars for Social Justice

  • Ananya Roy

    Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography, the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Saudi Garcia

FAJI Executive Director

Dr. Saudi Garcia is an organizational steward, scholar, public educator and writer. She is the Director of the Freedom and Justice Institute and of the Dominican-Haitian social justice, peace and liberation organization In Cultured Company. Dr. Garcia is a graduate of Brown University & New York University, where she trained as an anthropologist of race and science, technology, medicine and society (STMS). She is also a former Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The New School’s Department of Anthropology (2022-24). In May of 2024, Dr. Garcia publicly resigned her Assistant Professorship in protest over her university’s violent response to student protests over the war in Gaza and the deterioration of labor conditions in higher education institutions. Her current project, FAJI, seeks to study & organize against those conditions. Dr. Garcia’s scholarship traces Caribbean geographies racial capitalism, toxic pollution, & climate catastrophe and their alternatives: Abolition democracy & BIack and Indigenous feminist traditions of earth stewardship. Her ongoing book project theorizes how Haitian & Black Dominican decolonial traditions inform present struggles against environmental racism, racialized social exclusion and extractivism on the island of Ayiti.