Alethia Jones

Faculty Fellow

Alethia Jones, PhD (Distinguished Lecturer, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies) joined CUNY in 2023 as a practitioner of labor education. She designs spaces for transformative and liberatory learning that strengthens organizers and drives strategic social change. She led leadership development at 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the nation’s largest union local where she re-aligned education programs to center member-driven power building for delegates, organizers, and officers. She subsequently directed global fellowship programs at Open Society Foundations supporting activists, academics and executive directors committed to human rights internationally. She serves on the boards of Highlander Research and Education Center and Training for Change. In addition, she advises the Advancing Black Strategists Initiative (Jobs with Justice) and United Maroon Indigenous Peoples. She co-authored the award-winning book on Black feminism, A’int Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith (with Virginia Eubanks and Barbara Smith). As a political scientist, she studied the politics of immigrant incorporation policies and urban community banking. As faculty member in Labor Studies, she teaches classes on immigration, social movements, labor organizing and intersectionality. At the Murphy Institute, she directs Civic Engagement and Leadership Development where she incubates the Movement Educators Learning Lab. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, she resides in Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean neighborhood.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.