About the Fellowship
The UMass Center for Justice, Law, and Societies and the SBS RISE program are proud to sponsor a fellowship that provides full time summer funding in the amount of $5000 for undergraduate students in SBS RISE, which provides opportunities for support, community, and leadership to students who identify as first-generation and/or economically disadvantaged. These students work with a faculty mentor on research. Fellows will work approximately 30 hours each week for about 11 weeks and will gain hands-on experience in research design, methods, and publication.
2026 RISE into Research Undergraduate Fellowship Teams
This fellowship, now in its fifth year, provides full-time summer funding for undergraduate students in the Remedying Inequity through Student Excellence (RISE) Program to work with a faculty mentor on research.
Varija is working with Dr. Adaora Ubaka (Management) on a project titled "Leading on the Edge: Risk Profiles and Survival in NCAA Division I Coaching and the Glass Cliff Phenomenon". This research project examines the "glass cliff," a phenomenon in which women and underrepresented racial minorities are more likely to be appointed to leadership roles during times of crisis or instability. Using 25 years of NCAA Division I athletics data, the project identifies different patterns of risk at the time coaches are hired and examines how those patterns shape coaching tenure and career outcomes.
Mariama is working with Professor Musbah Shaheen (Education Policy, Research & Administration) on "Talking Politics: Political Discourse in College Classrooms", a project that examines how college students engage in political discourse in a classroom setting and which approaches they find effective — or ineffective — for navigating tension when it arises.
Qua'Nae is working with Dr. Sadiyah Malcolm-Wallace on a project examining the school "Prom Send-Off" celebration as a sociologically significant site of aesthetic production, refusal, and excess, analyzing how young people and their families mobilize adornment and spectacle to refuse dominant narratives around economic marginalization. Employing qualitative methods such as interviews, participant observation, and media analysis, the project centers the voices of young people, their families, school personnel, and local business owners.
Afia is working with Dr. Sindiso Mnisi Weeks on a project on “Piloting “Ubuntu” as Arts-Based Social Cohesion at UMass Amherst”. This project partners with the Boston-based nonprofit Arts for Social Cohesion and the UMass Center for Data Science to pilot a campus residency operationalizing the African principle of Ubuntu ("A person is a person in, through, and because of other people"). The project co-designs a "Crowdsourced Poem" — a unique survey instrument that turns student stories into both a live performance and a dataset for AI analysis.