A letter from SJI’s founding director, Dr. Barbara Ransby, on SJI’s leadership transition

A letter from SJI's founding director, Dr. Barbara Ransby

September 3, 2026

Dear friends and colleagues,

It has been a privilege and a pleasure to serve as the founding director of UIC’s Social Justice Initiative for the past fourteen years. It was bittersweet to step down from this role on August 15th, but I am proud to welcome my esteemed colleague Dr. Terrion Williamson as SJI’s new director. What I feel most profoundly is gratitude. I have had the pleasure to work with a long list of talented and committed staff, colleagues, students and community partners--too many to name here. Their imprint on SJI and me remain palpable and powerful, and I am grateful for their long hours, loving interventions and creative problem solving. I also owe enormous thanks to my devoted faculty advisory council. They have been steadfast in their support for our work over many years, while carrying and leading their own projects. We have also enjoyed the backing and affirmation of several successive provosts and chancellors, and many deans across the campus, including my own LAS dean, as well as their hard-working teams. SJI is close to my heart, but it is not mine alone.

SJI’s primary goal has been to bolster that part of UIC’s mission which seeks “to create knowledge that transforms our views of the world and, through sharing and application, transforms the world." I would add that it is also our obligation as a public institution to transform the world in the service of the greater public good. In other words, to help move the needle on freedom and justice, alleviate suffering, urge greater equity and democracy, and through our work to hopefully lessen the proliferation of violence targeting both humans and the entire living ecosystem. Our job is not to mandate what justice looks like, but to engage university-based thinkers with community-based ones to wrestle with the social justice challenges of our time, and there are many.

In the service of this mission over the past fourteen years, we have hosted dozens of amazing films and independent filmmakers, performances by provocative artists, lectures by Nobel Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winning authors, and workshops and discussions led by highly respected community organizers. We have curated book talks, exhibitions and symposia dealing with an array of issues, from racism and transphobia to poverty and wealth inequality. Our speakers have shared their expertise on political landscapes from Haiti to Palestine, affordable healthcare, the plight of immigrant families and low-wage workers in Chicago, and many more subjects. We have co-sponsored and benefitted greatly from collaborations with sister units on campus, including the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, the Great Cities Institute, the Institute for the Humanities, the Collaboratory for Health Justice, the Jane Addam Hull-House Museum, our vibrant cultural centers, and numerous academic departments. We have been fortunate to receive funding support from an eclectic roster of local and national foundations and donors. We are most grateful to the Marguerite Casey Foundation for its enormous investment and generous vote of confidence in our work.

SJI began our collaborative projects in 2012 by partnering with the Nobel Women’s Initiative (NWI) and, over three years, hosted three distinguished women Nobel Laureates on our campus: Jody Williams (U.S.), Leymah Gbowee (Liberia), and Shirin Ebadi (Iran). In 2013, we presented our work at an NWI international conference in Belfast. The following year, in 2014, we organized a national conference, “Freedom Dreams, Freedom Now,” featuring the late Julian Bond, Robin D.G. Kelley, Angela Davis, and the late Karen Lewis, alongside other scholars and historic figures. Other major SJI programs included “Geographies of Justice,” UIC’s very first Mellon-supported Sawyer Seminar in 2016-2017, which convened scholars from three continents to compare notes on human rights; the founding of the Chicago Justice Gallery at UIC, which has mounted exhibitions featuring artists, historians, and community based organizers exploring various justice themes including Chicago’s own Tonika Lewis Johnson; and the COVID-era Portal Project, which hosted a virtual global symposium that spanned three years and touched on the critical social justice debates of our time. The Portal Project culminated in an international conference attended by 1,000 people, with a robust and eclectic roster of speakers and artists. Most recently, in June of this year, SJI convened It’s On Us: A Day of Art and Action, which included morning programs in celebration of Chicago freedom struggles across the city, followed by a free festival at the DuSable Museum featuring community resource tables, artmaking activities, speakers, poets, and performers including Jamila Woods, Damon A. Williams, Kristiana Colón, Taína Asili, and Maria Gaspar. These multiple and overlapping programs, conversations and convenings have yielded publications, new collaborations and a network of trusted relationships among scholars, writers, artists and organizers who would not have connected otherwise.

In addition to our programs and events, SJI has engaged UIC students in several ways. We developed the Pipeline to Justice Award to support engaged UIC student-activist leaders in pursuing their studies. In partnership with Gender and Women’s Studies, we launched the Social Justice Minor, which supports rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship to prepare students to face some of the most pressing challenges in our world. We have also been proud to employ dozens of student workers who have contributed to our work in immeasurable ways.

We have done a lot of good work over the past decade and a half, but I am most grateful and excited for what comes next. SJI has established a reputation and a solid foundation, and we are fortunate that the brilliant scholar, Dr. Terrion Williamson, has agreed to serve as the incoming director of SJI. I could not be more thrilled. A first-generation college graduate and alum of UIC, Dr. Williamson went on to earn a J.D. from UIUC and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. She is the author of Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, the editor of Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest, has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and essays, and has a highly anticipated forthcoming book on Black women and violence in Peoria. Her remarkable vision and leadership of the Black Midwest Initiative earned her a competitive Mellon Foundation award in 2025 to design and create the Black Midwest Justice Hub. This fall, as SJI director and part of the American Studies Association program committee, Dr. Williamson is curating the Social Justice Institute at ASA, a series of conference-adjacent events that will bring internationally renowned scholars to our campus and give students a glimpse into the debates and cutting-edge scholarship that defines the ASA intellectual community. I am so looking forward to seeing where this dynamic new leader will take SJI, and how SJI, in new and exciting ways, will continue to build community, provoke new ideas, and elevate UIC’s stated social justice mission.

The work of conscientious and principled scholars, teachers, and institutional leaders is needed now more than ever. We are witnessing an enormous assault on some of the best and most democratic aspects of university life: the right to speak, protest, dissent, research and write freely. The boundaries of officially acceptable speech are shrinking and those present to say it are becoming fewer. Doors are closing in the faces of those who have been historically excluded and marginalized within higher education. This is a step backward, echoing the disgraceful days of the Jim Crow university. An authoritarian shadow has been cast over every aspect of our work and lives.

This is not the time to lower our heads, but to raise our voices. I plan to continue to do so as a core part of my retirement plan of action. Please join me. Please keep in touch. And please support, amplify, and continue to build the social justice research, service and teaching at UIC, and continue to organize, support and defend our students and colleagues who are most vulnerable and/or under assault. Remember campus workers and unions need our strong support too. As an historian, I know that one day future generations will look back on these trying and gut-wrenching times, and the question will be – which side were we on? Let’s do our best to grow our souls and muster our courage to stand on the right side of history. After every dark night comes morning.

I am stepping down this year from SJI, am on leave this academic year, and officially retire on August 15, 2027. After that I can best be reached via my gmail. Please mark your calendars for a retirement symposium on May 13-14, 2027.

Sincerely and in solidarity,

Barbara