Forging Pathways to a Just Future.
We support and sustain a community of scholars, students, and engaged partners who generate and act upon visions of just futures, where all people can thrive.
We bring together people, knowledge, and action to forge paths to a transformed future.
We have three core strategies for achieving our mission
Cultivate communities of learning
Support innovative research, performance, and art
Catalyze action
Cultivate communities of learning
We create transformative educational opportunities that foster dialogue and deepen connections between faculty, students, postdocs, and community members working in the area of racial justice.
Support innovative research, performance, and art
Support innovative research, performance, and art across disciplines to develop knowledge and produce ideas about race, racism, and reinforcing dimensions of inequality.
Catalyze action
Catalyze action that carries impact beyond Cornell and is responsive to the challenges and opportunities identified through research, practice, and community partnership.
Who We Are
We focus on learning, knowing, and doing. Researchers at the center conduct research and deploy what we learn to create change in communities. We work collaboratively, guided by a grounded and strategic vision of how social change is achieved.
Our Programs
The Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures bridges research and action to advance positive change. We bring together researchers, organizations, and communities to co-develop knowledge that equips ordinary people to forge paths toward a more just world.
Collaborating with partners allows for tangible community impact.
Futures We Support
In order to build a durable foundation for the work of advancing racial justice, strategic collaboration is a must. We foster partnerships between researchers and social change organizations that seed ideas, co-produce research, and apply knowledge in rigorous and meaningful ways. Our programs and partnerships emphasize interdependence and organizing as paths toward narrative shifts, powerbuilding, and social change.
Our work has, by design, tangible impact beyond Cornell, responding to the challenges identified through research and in partnerships.
News
Joseph Margulies publishes “Cast Out: A Call for Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration”
Joseph Margulies, a professor of practice in the department of Government at Cornell and partner of the Center, has published "Cast Out: A Call for Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration," out from Beacon Press. In the book, Margulies, a civil rights lawyer who runs the Compassionate Release Project, spent years talking with six people who committed serious crimes. He asks readers to consider not only what they did, but the circumstances that shaped their lives, how they have reckoned with the harm they caused, and whether a more forgiving society is possible.
Why More Tenants Are Forming Unions
A new essay on the rise of tenant unions by Daniel Graham for Marketplace extensively cites research by Center director Jamila Michener, including a database of housing organizations in the U.S. and the ways in which people find their power to get their needs met.
Examples of How Anti-Blackness Operates in Kinesiology’s Scientific Practice
Tori Justin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center, has published new research on the persistence of anti-blackness in kinesiology and other scientific practices. Through interviews with Black women scholars, Justin analyzes anti-blackness and how it manifests across scholarly research, medical practice, health discourse, and more.
Faculty Fellow Alexander Livingston publishes “Power Without Violence” for The Hannah Arendt Center
Alexander Livingston, a 2026 faculty fellow at the Center, closely rereads Hannah Arendt's "On Violence" (1970) and examines the essay's deep insights on power and violence as well as the important histories it overlooks—in particular the long history of nonviolent struggle and what nonviolence can teach us about power.
Pearson publishes Social Psychology, 12th edition, co-authored by Neil Lewis, Jr.
Neil Lewis, Jr., associate director at the Center, co-authored a new edition of Social Psychology. The 12th edition introduces the key concepts of the field through a storytelling approach, and, with brand new chapters and new features, is updated to reflect the latest research. The authors examine recent topics such as social media’s role in shaping conformity, loneliness and isolation as public health concerns, the ubiquity of web-based classrooms and workplaces, the impact of recent advances in AI upon the study of social cognition, and more.
Breaking Power to Build Democracy
Jamila Michener co-published a new white paper with Aubrey Hall, a graduate research assistant at the Center, as a part of a broader effort called the Empowering Democracy Initiative. In the paper, Michener and Hall argue for the necessity of balancing the scales of democratic governance by subverting excessive and unequal power relations in order to build a more responsive, sustainable, and egalitarian democracy.
Events
Toward Equitable Futures | The Law is Not Enough: Why People Power Matters with Jamila Michener
Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Conversation with Brandon Terry
Support Us
Your action makes a difference!
The research, learning, and action we undertake at RJEF require significant resources. Supporting RJEF is one way you can help to advance our mission.