The Presidential Fellows work with the president and Vice President for Institutional Diversity & Equity, creating research to address diversity and inclusion issues. The Presidential Fellows will focus on a variety of areas, with an overall commitment to the intellectual grounding of actions in research and program innovation.
Welcome to our 2023-2024 Presidential Fellows:
Stephen Haymes, associate professor in the College of Education, will use his fellowship year to assist DePaul in understanding the contemporary experience of DePaul’s Black, Catholic students, staff, and faculty; increase its understanding of and connection to anti-black racism; create an intercultural campus community of inclusion and hospitality that reflects Black Catholic worldview and traditions, religious expressions and intellectual thought; build a pipeline for recruitment of Black Catholic students, faculty and staff; and contribute to diasporic intellectual thought traditions of Afro-Catholicism in the Americas and its significance for reimagining liberatory pedagogies.
Overall, the project aims to gain knowledge regarding the lived reality of DePaul’s diverse community to help make it a more inclusive and equitable university. “It’s important to elevate the presence, visibility, and inclusion of intellectual, spiritual, and religious expression of Black Catholics,” says Haymes.
Jess Westbrook, associate professor in the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, who uses they/them pronouns, will use their fellowship year to explore the visible and invisible features and factors of lived experience and how individuals and groups navigate, and respect, social complexity through etiquette or other means.
“I’m interested in identity, vulnerability, presence, real realities, intersectionality and positionality in scenarios involving people,” Westbrook says. “What I will explore during this year is, what do we know about each other, what can we know about each other and how do individuals and groups navigate the complexities of intersectionality in social interaction and social spaces?”
Westbrook explains this work is particularly relevant in the age of evolving technologies that tend to
reproduce, amplify, and exacerbate dominant paradigms and social inequities.