Hi everyone, my name is Sham Habteselasse and I am the 2026-2027 Fellow in Resident for the Futures Initiative! I am proudly a first generation, Eritrean, Developmental Psychology PhD student hailing from Annandale, Virginia. Alongside my FI work, I teach at Brooklyn College, and as a writing tutor at Medgar Evers.

This is my second time as a fellow in resident for the Futures Initiative. During my first, in 2021-2022, I was early in my doctoral work, deeply interested in how students care for one another in academic institutions. I worked with the CUNY Peer Leaders (CPL) to explore how care was brought to life in the programming. My first solo report, Peer Possibilities: Addressing student well-being through peer programming, details how the holistic, peer-to-peer approach taken by CPL fosters care between students across the CUNY colleges, Graduate Center graduate students, and through FI’s structure. My time as a resident was formative in my doctoral work – it focused my interest on learning environments. 

Between my first residency and today, I have found myself working on projects and at organizations focused on both policy and educational youth programming. I firstly worked on the Crossing Borders to Connect Routes project, made up of an international collective of researchers, educators, and legal practitioners examining geographical, institutional, and symbolic borders shaping the experiences of racialized and migrant communities in educational environments. Concurrently, I picked up working on a research evaluation at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on their National Advocacy Institute, a summer program for youth organizers, advocates, and activists centered on gaining civil rights and social justice advocacy skills. 

My time at the ACLU played an instrumental role and interest in how contemporary censorship efforts are reshaping the United States educational landscape. Melding slowly with a personal draw to archival work specifically on overlooked and deliberately erased histories in the classroom, I have arrived here. My current research is situated across developmental psychology, Black studies, and critical childhood studies, my 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. I am interested in understanding how these policies shape student socioemotional experiences in school, racial literacy, and civic development. Through my study of censorship, I work 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. 

Bringing with me new learnings and experiences since my last fellowship, I am looking forward to getting a second go at this. In my current residency, I am excited to be supporting the University Worth Fighting For programming, highlighting brilliant interdisciplinary researchers, practitioners, activists, and many others. Now more than ever, it feels critical for educators and researchers to be active in the fight against forces that are interested in limiting what we learn and how we learn it. I hope that UWFF can be a place where we can continue to do that.