Sindiso MnisiWeeks, Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, has won a Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship for 2023-24.  The CLF program seeks to cultivate future campus leaders by offering a half-time, one-year temporary appointment to an administrative area on campus and providing mentoring from the leader of the host unit. In addition, fellows are expected to launch a significant program during their fellowship year. 

Professor MnsisiWeeks will focus on programmatic development for the UMass Amherst Mount Ida Campus, specifically developing a sustainable experiential cohort program for UMass Amherst undergraduate students in the area of Law and Policy Justice while also centering diversity, equity and inclusion. MnisiWeeks will be working with Michelle Budig, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs.

While the bulk of MnisiWeeks’s research and scholarship focuses on indigenous law, women’s rights, economic and social rights, and constitutionalism in her country of origin, South Africa, she has been teaching in the UMass system since her 2013 move to the United States. Her CLF project will build on her doctoral training in sociolegal studies, as well as experiences as a constitutional and human rights law scholar, community educator, policy advocate (or scholar-activist), and applied legal anthropologist in the Boston Human Rights City Initiative, an action-research project.