Michael R. Fisher Jr.
Assistant Professor
Department of African American Studies
Preferred: michael.fisher@sjsu.edu
Office Hours
TBD
Education
Ph.D., Vanderbilt University
M.A., Vanderbilt University
M.Div., Howard University
B.S., Howard University
Bio
Michael R. Fisher Jr., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the College of Social Sciences and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Humanities in the College of Humanities and the Arts at San José State University. He is also an Affiliate Scholar at the Metropolitan Policy Center in the School of Public Affairs at American University and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of South Africa.
Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Fisher specializes in affordable housing and homelessness, ethics and public policy, and race and socio-economic inequality. His current book project—Black Community Building: Public Housing Reform and the Promise of an Alternative Model to Mixed-Income Neighborhoods (under contract with Georgetown University Press)—reorients the debate on mixed-income housing by arguing that mixed-income housing creation as market-driven urban social policy must be abandoned given its disparate impact on Black communities living in high-poverty neighborhoods in U.S. cities.
Before his career as an educator, Dr. Fisher was a public policy advocate on Capitol Hill. His policy portfolio included financial reform and federal social welfare programs addressing poverty. He later transitioned to local politics and public policy when he became the inaugural Director of Advocacy at a nonprofit organization. There he was responsible for the development of the organization’s policy agenda and advocacy strategy for affordable housing creation and the elimination of chronic homelessness in the nation’s capital, working with other activists, agencies, D.C. residents, and elected officials in the process.