Alumna Charmaine Wijeyesinghe Honored with National Award for Social Change
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At the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), held in 2025 in New York City, UMass Amherst College of Education alumna Charmaine Wijeyesinghe ‘92EdD received the program’s highest honor for advancing equity: the Suzan Shown Harjo Advocate for Systemic Social Change Award. The recognition celebrates leaders dedicated to dismantling structural inequities and building pathways toward lasting change, and is named after the Indigenous activist, poet, and journalist, Suzan Shown Harjo.
NCORE is the largest conference in the United States addressing race and ethnicity in higher education. The award adds to Wijeyesinghe’s history with the organization; in 2017 she was honored with its Equity and Social Justice Award for Scholarship.
“Your legacy is inseparable from mentorship,” wrote the selection committee, noting Wijeyesinghe’s decades of support for new scholars in higher education. “Time and again, [your colleagues] returned to the theme of how you have shaped and supported scholars, not only through your formal contributions to the field but also through the intentional ways you have invested in the growth of others.”
Colleagues who nominated Wijeyesinghe highlighted her ability and commitment to guide others in developing their scholarship, whether through co-editing volumes, opening doors to publication opportunities, or modeling how to integrate rigorous research with commitments to justice.
During the award presentation ceremony, Wijeyesinghe’s career was summarized by fellow College of Education alumna Victoria Malaney Brown '20PhD, director of academic integrity at Columbia Engineering. Malaney Brown noted that over her 31 years of working with NCORE, Wijeyesinghe had presented over 120 major programs at the conference and led teams composed of more than 70 colleagues.
The award also recognized Wijeyesinghe’s groundbreaking scholarship on racial identity development and intersectionality, which the selection committee noted provided a foundation for others to build upon, with Wijeyesinghe often serving as their first and most important encourager. She built the foundations of her research at UMass Amherst, where she received her bachelor’s in psychology, and her master’s (in higher education administration) and doctoral degree from the College of Education.
As a doctoral candidate, Wijeyesinghe explored identity development in Multiracial people in research that was guided by the late Bailey W. Jackson III, professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Education, in the program that later became known as Social Justice Education. She collaborated with Jackson on two versions of the edited volume, New Perspectives on Racial Identity Development, that became foundational resources in scholarship on race and identity.
Wijeyesinghe’s work includes developing the Factor Model of Multiracial Identity and later expanding it into an Intersectional Model, frameworks that continue to shape national conversations on identity. Her development of this work at the College of Education continues to impact her today, as a Multiracial person of Sri Lankan and white ancestry who is frequently seen by others as Black.
“When people's physical appearance, as read by others, contradicts their ancestry or their sense of cultural norms, how do people navigate that?” Wijeyesinghe asks. “I started thinking of myself in relation to those models and, for the first time, identifying as Multiracial myself. I thought of the people who had taken risks and told me their stories as participants in my dissertation study—and I had to honor their stories by honoring my own.”