This year, Antiracist Research and Policy Center is delighted to announce two awardees whose work directly speaks to educational access and equity, Dr. Nicole Lorenzo and Dr. Mariam Durrani:

Dr. Nicole Lorenzo (CAS, Psychology) is the inaugural recipient of ARPC’s Racial Justice Research Seed Grant. Concerned by the low enrollment of children from Latine communities in mental and behavioral health intervention programs, Dr. Lorenzo will be developing a study aimed at building community partnerships and identifying barriers and facilitators to behavioral parenting interventions in Latine families. As a result, she plans to create a set of culturally informed guidelines for Latine parents of preschool children:

Externalizing behaviors are the most common behavioral disorders in children that can be identifiedas early as toddlerhood, with impairments resulting in a cascade of negative outcomes. Families from Latine communities are less likely to seek and receive mental health interventions, and more likely to drop-out of behavioral parenting interventions once enrolled. Barriers to engagement include systemic and individual factors. Recent research supports the need to attend to historical and continued oppression and negative experiences of individuals with marginalized identities and how these experiences impact their decision-making around mental health care for themselves and their child. However, strategies toward increasing engagement of Latineparents with early parenting interventions are largely unknown. The proposed study aims to addressthis problem by developing community partnerships and identifying barriers and facilitators tobehavioral parenting interventions for Latine families. The project is expected to yield an initial set of culturally informed guidelines toward developing an adaptive BPI for Latine parents of preschool children with behavior problems, who have the lowest utilization rates among racial/ethnic minority populations in the US.

Dr. Mariam Durrani (SIS) is this year’s Career Advancement Fellowship. Dr. Durrani’s project explores the impact of the War on Terror policies in both US and Pakistani higher education. During her fellowship, she will be developing a book manuscript that, based on mult-sited ethnography, examines how racial regimes in both countries shape access and mobility in higher education:

During the fellowship year, I hope to complete my book manuscript The Imperial Optic: At the Intersection of Migration, Racialization, and Higher Education in the US and Pakistan, on the impact of War on Terror (WoT) policies in US and Pakistani higher education. Based on fieldwork in Lahore, New York City, and online between 2013 and 2019 with two groups—(1) Pakistani Diaspora Muslim students at a US public college and (2) Pashtun ethnic minority Muslim scholarship students at a private Pakistani university— my book examines how complementary racial regimes of the US and Pakistan shape access and mobility in higher education based on modern-colonial logics of US empire and its policies.

Although college campuses are not typical “theaters of war,” my work demonstrates how performances and policies related to the “good Muslim”/“good Pashtun” student-subject functioned as everyday forms of educational imperialism for Pakistani-origin Muslim and Pashtun college students respectively, including NYPD surveillance on NYC campuses in NYC and educational opportunities made possible by GWOT policies of Pakistan. The book tracks these co-constitutive processes of imperial racialization across two contexts as parallel and related sets of youth-empire encounters based on multisided ethnography of global higher education and decolonial feminist analysis of youth-related policies in national security agreements in the US and in Pakistan.

About ARPC Research Awards

The Racial Justice Research Seed Grant provides faculty up to $7,500 to support early-stage work on a racial justice research project, in preparation for submitting at least one external funding proposal or fellowship application between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024. During the grant tenure, Seed Grant recipients are expected to participate in a research workshop with an interdisciplinary cadre of colleagues, attend a workshop on identifying and applying for external funding, and submit at least one external funding proposal or fellowship application.

Made possible through a generous endowment by ARPC supporters, the one-year Career Advancement Fellowship enables faculty to make significant and measurable progress on a major research project by providing up to $15,000 toward a one-course release from teaching, $2,500 in research funds, and the opportunity to share their work with an interdisciplinary cadre of colleagues. During the fellowship tenure, Fellows are expected to present their research to ARPC faculty affiliates and other colleagues at an invited workshop.