Fellow in Resident, Sham Habteselasse is a PhD student in Developmental Psychology at the Graduate Center and the 2026-2027, Fellow in Resident for the Futures Initiative.

Sham Habteselasse is a first generation, Eritrean, Developmental Psychology PhD student  hailing from Annandale, Virginia. She joins us this year for her second residency with the Futures Initiative; during her first, in 2021-2022, she explored how care was embedded in the CUNY Peer Leaders program (CPL). She authored, Peer Possibilities: Addressing student well-being through peer programming, a report detailing how the holistic, peer-to-peer programming approach taken by CPL fosters care between students across the CUNY colleges. Sham’s time as a resident anchors her approach to reimagining learning environments. In her current residency, she looks forward to supporting the University Worth Fighting For programming, highlighting brilliant interdisciplinary researchers, practitioners, activists, and many others.   

Care and inclusivity continue to frame her current work interrogating how contemporary censorship efforts are reshaping the United States educational landscape. Situating her work across developmental psychology, Black studies, and critical childhood studies, Sham’s research examines how policies restricting learning materials discussing race (e.g., nonfiction books discussing Black history, racial injustice, and social movements) shape student experiences in school. She is particularly interested in understanding how these policies shape student socioemotional experiences in school, racial literacy, and civic development. Through her study of censorship, she thinks through – what are the narratives that frame Black life in school, what are Black students up against, and what do Black students do to affirm their humanity in school.