FAJI Fellows 2025

Ghina Abi-Ghannam is a writer and researcher currently completing her PhD in Critical Social Psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She holds an MA in Psychology from the American University of Beirut. Some of her previous contributions include publishing on the social psychological study of violence in Palestine, the exile of Frantz Fanon from Social/Political Psychology, as well as the psychology of land dispossession. Her forthcoming works include a critical review of the political psychology literature on violence in the Middle East and a project examining the afterlives of psychological research literature in media coverage of war. Broadly, her scholarship orbits around critical science research, Marxist psychology, and the political psychology of violence.

Abi-Ghannam's fellowship project will investigate the reciprocal interaction between international solidarity and domestic labor organizing in the United States.

Lucien Baskin is a student in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center researching abolition, social movements, and the university. They are writing a dissertation on organizing at CUNY, as well as collaborative projects on Black feminism and education for liberation in the United States and Britain. Lucien’s writing has been published in outlets such as Truthout, Society & Space, The Abusable Past, and Mondoweiss. Currently, they serve as co-chair of the American Studies Association Critical Prison Studies Caucus, and work as a media and publicity fellow at Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center. Lucien organizes with CUNY for Palestine and is a (strike-ready!) rank-and-file member of the PSC.

Baskin's project aims to build political education infrastructure to continue the long history of internationalist and anti-colonial organizing at CUNY.

Caleb E. Dawson is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. His research examines how and why gendered racial inequality persists in US higher education and the structural challenges faced by those laboring to create change. Spanning pressing issues from student loan debt to racialized equity labor, Dawson leverages Black feminist theory and qualitative methods to advance our understandings of antiblackness and the paradoxes of inclusion. Moreover, he is dedicated to reimagining and redistributing state-sanctioned resources to build life-affirming institutions and sustain state-forsaken peoples. Dawson earned his PhD and MA in Education through the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender cluster at the University of California, Berkeley.

In collaboration with the Higher Education Race and the Economy Lab at UC Merced, Dr. Dawson’s project examines the experiences and insights of college student activists amidst repressive anti-DEI legislation.

Ajamu Dillahunt-Holloway is an Assistant Professor of African American History and Public History at NC State University. His research is on twentieth century African American history with a focus on the U.S. South, labor, environmental justice, and the Black Freedom Struggle. Dillahunt-Holloway has an uncompromising commitment to using his research to help make the world a better place. At present, he is active in a number of community organizations and a board member of the Interreligious Foundation of Community Organizations(IFCO), the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network(NCEJN), and Democracy North Carolina. Dillahunt-Holloway earned his Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University in 2023. He holds a B.A. in History and a B.A. in Political Science from North Carolina Central University.

Dillahunt-Holloway’s project seeks to use the history of worker resistance to help organize workers in the present.

Philip V. McHarris (he/him) is an assistant professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. McHarris’ research focuses on racial inequality, housing, and policing. He is the author of Beyond Policing, which traces the historical arc of policing and presents transformative visions for safety and justice. He is also currently at work on Brick Dreams (under advanced contract with Princeton University Press), an ethnography-based manuscript focused on the New York City Housing Authority and the contemporary realities and challenges of public housing in America. He earned his PhD in Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University. 

McHarris’ project will focus on laying the foundation for a research and community engagement lab dedicated to abolitionist and decolonial approaches to safety.

Dr. David C. Turner III is an Assistant Professor of Black Life and Racial Justice in the Department of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. He is also the Faculty Director of the Million Dollar Hoods Project - a community-driven research initiative to map the fiscal and human cost of incarceration. As an activist scholar from Inglewood, California, his research broadly focuses on social movements, political identity, and resistance to the prison regime. As a community organizer, Dr. Turner brings over a decade of movement-building experience to the classroom, having worked to negotiate and win demands for racial justice, secure funding, divest resources from carceral and harmful institutions, and coordinate actions across the state of California and the nation. Dr. Turner has participated in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) as a political education and research specialist, helping organizations with teach-ins, designing curricula, and community-based participatory action research. Dr. Turner has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education, NBC BLK, the Los Angeles Times, Spectrum 1 News, and the New York Times for his activism and applied scholarship. 

In his proposed project, Turner would like to build an interactive database of the cost of policing campus-based protests across the country.

Maya Wind is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Black Study and Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her scholarship explores how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. Her writing on the imbrication of the university with violence have appeared in Cultural Anthropology and South Atlantic Quarterly, and her first book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2024), investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in settler colonialism and apartheid. She came to the university from organizing and political education, and has worked on campaigns for decolonization and abolition with student and faculty groups, academic associations, and academic unions. She earned her PhD in American Studies from New York University.

Wind’s project contributes to laying the groundwork for campus-based organizing for Palestinian liberation and coordination with movement work beyond the campus.