CLEAR Fellowships

CLEAR Faculty Fellowships

The 2022-2023 CLEAR Faculty Fellows will address priorities such as racialized housing inequalities and structural barriers to equitable community development as well as criminal justice and  immigration justice.

CLEAR Cohort for Community Development, Entrepreneurship and Housing: Current Perspectives on Systemic Inequalities 

Melvin J. Kelley IV
Associate Professor, Law and Business, School of Law and D’Amore McKim School of Business
Project: No Further Fair Housing: Stuck in Transition on the Path to Transformation

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 requires that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as well as recipients of federal funds under its programs, “affirmatively further fair housing,” which entails a mandate to proactively redress the harms of segregation. Professor Kelley’s research examines whether approaches from the human rights field of transitional justice might assist in the interpretation and implementation of this controversial statutory provision. During his fellowship year he will convene scholars in a range of disciplines who are exploring how to remediate enduring legacies of historical race-based oppression to assist in the evaluation of prospects for redressing contemporary inequities in real property ownership and regional maldistributions of resources across racialized spaces.

Ana M. Rivera
Associate Clinical Professor and Director, Housing Rights Clinic, School of Law
Project: Housing Discrimination in the COVID Era

Professor Rivera is director of Northeastern Law’s Housing Rights Advocacy Clinic, which she founded in 2022. Through individual representation, the new clinic will address legal issues faced by low-income communities. In her experience as a practicing housing rights lawyer, Professor Rivera litigated cases involving residential leasing practices that disparately affected BIPOC and tenants from poor communities. These practices prevailed in the COVID era and exacerbated exponentially the pressures on renters and recipients of benefits such as ERAP (Emergency Rental Assistance Program) and Section 8 support. During her fellowship year, Professor Rivera will examine how facially neutral leasing provisions intersect with federal, local, and state housing laws and regulations, and potential reforms to address their harmful impact.

Evan Darryl Walton
Associate Clinical Professor and Director, Community Business Clinic
Project: Hidden Barriers to Small Business Growth and their Disproportionate Effect on BIPOC and Female Entrepreneurs

Professor Walton brings a seasoned practice career to the Business Clinic he leads at Northeastern. In the course of his practice, he encountered barriers to business growth in the form of direct and indirect costs that disproportionately impact new entrants in commercial spaces, including his BIPOC business clients. Drawing on his experiences as a practitioner, Professor Walton will examine the effects of these barriers on new entrants through a comparison of the rules and practices of three states. He will examine the impact of costs such as LLC registration, maintenance fee structures, and incentives for economic business zones. Professor Walton hopes to interest students in this project, which will include qualitative study and comparative legal analysis.

Lily Song
Assistant Professor, Race and Social Justice in the Built Environment, Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design
Project: The ARTery: Re-imagining and Re-formulating Spatial Planning and Development with Local Communities in Roxbury

Professor Song is an urban planner and activist-scholar who studies long-term community engagement practices. Her research focuses on the relations between urban infrastructure and redevelopment initiatives, socio-spatial inequality, and race, class and gender politics in American cities and other decolonizing contexts. During her fellowship year, Professor Song will partner with Boston public officials to design cultural interventions that target the gentrification trends and displacement pressures in Roxbury. The ARTery project seeks to use public art to amplify cultural identity, economic opportunity and social cohesion among neighborhood residents. Professor Song will work with community-based artists, activists and small business owners to generate public art. This fellowship will provide the opportunity to assess the strengths, tensions and opportunities of the ARTery project, and, more generally, to consider how spatial planning and design practices can incorporate, deepen and reflect conversations on reparations and transitional justice.

2022 CLEAR CRIMINAL JUSTICE FELLOW

Rebecca Chapman
Social Justice Teaching Fellow, Legal Services in Social Context Program, School of Law
Project: Jails: The Black Box of Mass Incarceration

A former public defender in New York City, Professor Chapman’s fellowship projects speak to the jail to prison pipeline. Her work focuses on racialized jail incarceration in New York City, and, secondly and relatedly, the vacuum in rights protection for families exposed to the city’s child protective services system. In collaboration with social justice organizations, public defender groups in New York, and her students at Northeastern Law, Professor Chapman will track and report on the effects of individual judicial attitudes on jail incarceration rates in New York City. As one intervention in the jail-to-prison pipeline, she also proposes to develop empirical and qualitative evidence to support the efforts of The Bronx Defenders, a New York public defender organization, to promote state legislation that would protect the right of families to be informed of their legal rights at their first point of contact with workers from the child protection system.

2022 CLEAR IMMIGRATION JUSTICE FELLOW

Rachel Rosenbloom
Professor, School of Law
Project: Citizenship for Some: White Nationalism and the Long Roots of the Movement to Restrict Constitutional Birthright Citizenship

Professor Rosenbloom’s fellowship year will allow her to pursue her book project, Citizenship for Some: White Nationalism and the Long Roots of the Movement to Restrict Constitutional Birthright Citizenship. Tracing the origins of the contemporary movement to limit birthright citizenship, Professor Rosenbloom’s work examines the numerous efforts of anti-immigrant activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to restrict the scope of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment through litigation and proposed constitutional amendments. It also explores the more hidden, bureaucratic life of the Citizenship Clause, manifested in agency records, court dockets, personal accounts and other materials relating to the determinations that occur, day in and day out, at borders, immigration courts, State Department offices, county jails and numerous other sites where citizenship lines are drawn. Professor Rosenbloom argues that despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship without regard to race, birthright citizenship’s racialized origins have shown a persistent tendency to resurface in the context of immigration enforcement efforts. Whether targeting Chinese Americans during the Chinese Exclusion era, Mexican-Americans in the 1930s, or in recent decades, a broad spectrum of Black and brown Americans have been swept up by a racialized mass deportation system that has become increasingly intertwined with a racialized system of mass incarceration.