Our Programs

Alexander Livingston is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government, and affiliated faculty in the American Studies and Religious Studies programs. His primary areas of research are democratic theory, social movements, religion and politics, and the history of twentieth-century political thought. He is the founding co-director of Cornell’s Democracy Scholars Program, a civic humanities summer institute opening pathways to higher education for rural high school students, and a former director of the Society for the Humanities.

Livingston’s fellowship project at the Center, Tough Love: The Prophetic Politics of Martin Luther King, Jr., reexamines King as an original political thinker by placing the religious foundations of his thought at the center of his public philosophy. Resituating King’s writings on civil disobedience, economic justice, and constitutional struggle within the contexts of midcentury political theology and the practices of the Southern Black church, the book aims to unsettle the secular assumptions of contemporary political theory and highlight the enduring significance of African American religious thought for contemporary debates about freedom, equality, and dissent.

Dr. Amelia Moore is an environmental anthropologist and Associate Professor of Environmental Justice, Law, and Policy in the Natural Resources and Environment (NRE) Section of the new Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). Dr. Moore’s research explores island and coastal politics, the social effects of transnational environmental science and technology, and the inequities exacerbated by major global environmental changes like climate change, sea level rise, and biodiversity loss. She attempts to rigorously center equity and justice praxis in her research, teaching, and service within interdisciplinary STEM programs, which has meant working with a critical mass of experienced scholars to build a cohesive vision, committed leadership, and structural support for transformative program development.  

As a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, Dr. Moore will contribute to the mission to “bring together people, knowledge, and action to forge paths to a transformed future” and to further the goal of “cultivating a community of learning” by planning and convening the Just Ocean and Coastal Futures Conference for the fall of 2026. This event will bring together future-oriented scholars who integrate racial justice work with anti-racist, de- and anti-colonial practices, and other reparative frameworks into coastal and ocean studies. The purpose of the conference is to share and produce knowledge while imagining, designing, and supporting strategic action. 

Over multiple days of individual presentations, invited keynotes, roundtable discussions, workshop sessions, and communal events, participants will acknowledge, identify, and challenge pernicious ocean and coastal inequities including past and present events and structural processes at local, regional, and global scales. This will be an intimate gathering of professional scholars and graduate students from around the US, working domestically and internationally, committed to catalyzing just futures in coastal and ocean studies via knowledge and practice sharing, networking, and solidarity building. Dr. Moore hopes this event will help to reaffirm commitments to changing the culture of ocean and coastal research and policy in a time of fear and retrenchment. 

Dr. Danny Parker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her research examines the role communication information environments play in the reproduction of poverty and the development of political identity. In particular, she studies how structural conditions—from carceral state economics to media coverage of poverty—undermine equal access to democratic institutions and weaken belief in democracy among poor communities.

With support from the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, Dr. Parker is launching the Community Voice Project, a multi-year, multi-city research program examining how structural conditions shape political beliefs and behaviors in low-income communities across different configurations of regional governance, community infrastructure, news ecologies, and demographic contexts. The project focuses especially on participants’ experiences with the criminal justice system, public assistance, access to medical care, environmental safety, and reliable information.

The project meets people where they are, deploying ethically trained research teams to conduct field surveys and documentary interviews in structurally disadvantaged communities across the United States. The research captures the political voice of citizens often excluded from public opinion research to ensure that perspectives frequently missing from conventional accounts of American democracy are heard, documented, and incorporated into contemporary political communication research. These accounts are then paired with administrative and GIS data to produce a detailed portrait of participants’ civic lives. Central to the project’s model is building long-term relationships with non-profit community partners to strengthen institutional trust and support Cornell’s land grant mission. This is accomplished through listening, providing material and logistical support, and collecting requested data specific to their missions so they can better serve their communities.

Isabel María Perera is an Assistant Professor of Government. Her research examines how politics shape the social policies, labor markets, and overall economies of post-industrial societies, focusing on the United States and Western Europe. Her first book, The Welfare Workforce: Why Mental Health Care Varies Across Affluent Democracies (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series), pointed to the political role of public sector trade unions in shaping mental health and other social services. Other work has appeared in World Politics, Governance, Politics & Society, as well as several health and medical journals, such as the Lancet Psychiatry and the American Journal of Public Health.

As a Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures Faculty Fellow, she will develop her next major project, Diversity and Distribution: Race, Immigration, and the Welfare State. The project systematically interrogates the popular claim that racially diverse societies cannot develop generous social benefits, hypothesizing that demography is not destiny. During her fellowship period, she will develop a new graduate seminar on this subject. Her broader aim is to learn from and foster scholarship on the relationship between political economy and racial equity.

Jocelyn Poe, Ph.D., AICP is an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Her research centers on communal trauma, spatial justice, and the development of reparative planning practices that aim to foster more equitable futures. Dr. Poe is the Director of the Reparative Praxis Lab and the founder and principal of SaHA Planning Studio, LLC, where she integrates theory and practice to advance healing-centered planning strategies. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Development from the University of Southern California, a Master of Community Planning from Auburn University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Tuskegee University. Her work has been recognized through fellowships such as the Health Policy Research Scholar Fellowship from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Spatial Futures Fellowship from PolicyLink.

As both Global South and Deep South leaders turn toward reparations to envision a future where economic development can heal the land and its people, there are opportunities to integrate reparative theories, methodologies, and strategies from across the African diaspora. This project contributes to building a reparative praxis framework by exploring how a collaborative knowledge exchange can advance reparatory justice movements across these vastly different yet intersectional geographies. To explore this question, we engage an innovative method used in reparative spaces across the African continent: Indaba. This term originates from the Zulu language and describes a traditional gathering in which discourse and decision-making happen through diverse voices in public space. The goal is to expand reparatory knowledge, support policy, and programmatic implementation on the ground, and advance robust research on just and equitable development.