Dr. Justin Coles Selected As North Star Collective Faculty Fellow

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Dr. Justin Coles, Associate Professor of Social Justice Education in the College of Education, has been selected as a North Star Collective Faculty Fellow. The prestigious fellowship, centered on supporting BIPOC faculty in their writing, researching, and publishing endeavors, chose 33 faculty from across 20 member institutions. 

“It is exciting to be part of a fellowship that has formed in the legacy of possibility in a world where minoritized people have often had their aspirations and desires for futurity foreclosed upon. Given the double meaning of the fellowship name, North Star Collective—both a tribute to enslaved Black people who used the North Star to guide their escapes to freedom, and to Frederick Douglass' antislavery newspaper—I am brought into a space of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) faculty across the New England region who are committed to organizing in ways that help us imagine "escapes" to building newer and more liberatory academic spaces. These new spaces we can create do not position us and our work as marginal, but rather as essential to the everyday workings of our disciplines and the futurity of those fields,” Dr. Coles comments. 

The North Star Collective is a group of colleges and universities, including UMass Amherst, in the New England region working towards supporting BIPOC faculty with a reparative justice approach. The Faculty Fellowship, set to start its new cohort in the spring, hosts several writing workshops and groups, opportunities for research promotion, and aims to foster a community of BIPOC faculty across member institutions. The fellowship is part of a reparative justice program by the New England Board of Higher Education, which intends to remedy the past harms of structural racism and inequalities that still impacts BIPOC faculty today. 

During the semester-long program set to begin in Spring 2025, Dr. Coles plans to work on his first solo-authored book that explores “Black youth aesthetics as a pedagogical counter-force to manifestations of anti-Blackness in schools and society.” The book will be released in Fall 2025.  

Dr. Coles has been a part of the EDUC faculty since 2021. In addition to his role as an Associate Professor, Dr. Coles is also the Director of Arts, Culture, and Political Engagements at the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research within EDUC. Dr. Coles’ prior research focuses on the intersection between critical race and Black studies, teaching, and the presence of symbolic violence and racism in educational institutions’ practices. His past projects have been published in several journals, such as the Journal of Teacher Education, The Journal of Negro Education, and the Journal of Language & Literacy in Education.

With the beginning of the fellowship, Dr. Coles is most excited to “connect with other faculty—whether in education like myself, or in biology, economics, art history, or computer science—who are thinking deeply about the ways community, along the lines of our collective identities as BIPOC faculty, can serve as a site of preservation and sustainability. All of this enables us to show up for our respective universities, departments, students, and programs in really robust ways, and, most importantly, to show up for ourselves.”

More information on Dr. Coles’ research is available on his website and more information about the North Star Collective Faculty Fellowship program can be found on the NSC website.