The Seattle-based Marguerite Casey Foundation has announced the 2023 cohort of Freedom Scholars, six progressive academics leading research and engaging in movement organizing that advances racial and economic justice.

The Freedom Scholars program provides a one-time, unrestricted award of $250,000 to each honoree to advance their work. This year’s recipients include Charmaine Chua of the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose work confronts the global regimes of production and distribution that configure race and class inequalities, with a focus on how these inequalities are lived, contested, and overcome by anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist freedom struggles; Adom Getachew of the University of Chicago, whose work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean; Dayo F. Gore of Georgetown University, author of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War and a co-editor of Want to Start A Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle; Mimi E. Kim of California State University, Long Beach, who is investigating the historical development of carceral feminism and the persisting phenomenon she calls the carceral creep; Premilla Nadasen of Barnard College, who has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing; and Chandan Reddy of the University of Washington, whose scholarship and activism seeks to disrupt and end colonial systems of power and violence that are foundational to and reproduce U.S. society, with a focus on migration, racialized genders, and queer of color sexualities.

“The 2023 Freedom Scholars are at the forefront of teaching, researching, and writing about shifting the balance of power in society,” said Marguerite Casey Foundation president and CEO Carmen Rojas. “Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Freedom Scholars award is committed to providing social and economic justice scholars room to deepen their relationship with movement leaders fighting for a multiracial democracy and just economy.”

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