Two paths, one destination—Postbaccalaureate research fellows join the institute to research mass incarceration

Two paths, one destination

Postbaccalaureate research fellows join the institute to research mass incarceration

October 15, 2025

A first-generation Nigerian immigrant, Wonu Fasasi grew up in Newark, New Jersey, which seemed to her like a utopia as a child. Wonu’s best friends were from Sri Lanka and Nicaragua, and it seemed everyone she met on the street was from a different far-flung corner of the globe. “If you were to think of America as a melting pot,” she says, “you would think Jersey is the best.”

*Wonu Fasasi conducts mock interview with returning citizen*

Then, the summer after her fifth-grade year, Wonu watched in shock and horror as Eric Garner was killed by a New York City Police officer in an illegal chokehold during an arrest on Staten Island, less than 15 miles from her home. Suddenly the realities of race and criminal justice became viscerally real to her. As she watched the killing of a Black man by a police officer on television, her mind raced. How could this happen? How could it be televised? Why do people seem to be OK with it? Why isn’t justice being administered fairly?

Even at such a young age, this experience awoke in Wonu a lifelong passion for justice. “Ever since, I have been animated by the question of who gets to make the policy decisions,” she says. “How do I and other people who look like me get to be in the room to help make those decisions?”

“I have been animated by the question of who gets to make the policy decisions.”

Wonu came to Notre Dame to answer that question. As an undergraduate, she served as a research assistant at the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights, where she analyzed systemic barriers to education. And through the Institute for Social Concerns’ NDBridge program, she spent the summer before her sophomore year at Hopeprint, Inc., in Syracuse, New York, where she examined the effects of community-based investments on urban neighborhoods. The following summer, she returned to Hopeprint at the invitation of its director to serve as a neighborhood development assistant manager.

Wonu graduated from Notre Dame in May with a bachelor’s degree in global affairs. This fall she returned for the first cohort of the Postbaccalaureate Fellowship at the institute.

She is joined by Hayden Kirwan, who spent his first 18 years in Harrisonburg, Virginia, a unique rural Appalachian community that serves as a resettlement area for refugees from over 75 countries. “This experience immediately confronted me with various types of American poverty,” he shares.

As with Wonu, Hayden was drawn to Notre Dame by its mission to be a force for good, hoping that a rigorous liberal arts education would give him the lens needed to understand the world and make a small change. He came to the institute through the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor out of a desire to understand what drives American and global poverty like he encountered growing up in Harrisonburg.

*Hayden Kirwan, right, helps facilitated Jails to Jobs workshop*

In his junior year, Hayden joined the Just Wage Research Lab with the Higgins Labor Program at the institute, which he continued with during his senior year. He also worked as a summer labor fellow through Higgins at the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs in Washington, DC, and participated in the institute’s Inside-Out program at Westville Correctional Facility. “I found an academic home here,” he states of the institute, “and never left.”

After graduating from Notre Dame in May with a degree in history and a minor in education, schooling, and society—along with his minor in poverty studies—Hayden returned to the institute this fall for the Postbaccalaureate Fellowship.

The Postbaccalaureate Fellowship is organized around three major components. First, each fellow is developing a substantive research project related to their work. Second, they engage with institute staff in discernment work on next steps as they pursue a life committed to justice. And, finally, they work in collaboration with community members and organizations focused on returning citizens—including the St. Joseph County Jail, the South Bend Community Reentry Center, and nonprofit organizations like Dismas House of Indiana.

Each week, Wonu and Hayden are teaching three-hour workshops in the jail called Jails to Jobs, alternating between teaching women and men, using curriculum developed in California prisons and adapted to the Indiana context. They are also conducting mock interviews at the reentry center to assist returning citizens with career preparation. And together they are doing research to develop a digital literacy curriculum for a course they will teach at the reentry center to returning citizens who have limited experience with newer technology.

*Left to right, Jim Cunningham, Hayden Kirwan, Wonu Fasasi at Jails to Jobs workshop*

“The focus on mass incarceration feels like a perfect fit because it allows me to continue rigorous research for the common good, while also practicing it and being rooted in the community,” says Hayden.

“Mass incarceration,” Wonu adds, “has always been an area of scholarly research and intellectual engagement that I’ve been drawn to. I’ve taken classes, read books, and written papers on mass incarceration, but this will be my first time doing fieldwork.”

“I found an academic home here and never left.”

While still early in their vocational discernment, they are already finding connections between their fellowship and potential future careers. “Long-term, I hope to go to law school,” Wonu shares. “I’ve always been justice-focused and want to be involved in policy work. I believe there’s a gap in policy where there isn’t enough empathy and people-centered focus. I want to go to law school to try to figure out how to fix that.”

“I’m torn between two routes,” says Hayden. “I love history research and have long considered pursuing a Ph.D. in history. However, I also feel compelled to get out and interact with the people and communities I care about. The postbaccalaureate position is the perfect fusion of these two interests, and I believe it will help me discern my future path.”

This is the pilot year for the fellowship, with plans to grow and develop it into a program that will bring fellows to the institute to engage a range of issues South Bend is grappling with that intersect with the institute’s major research areas of the environment, labor, mass incarceration, migration, poverty, and technology.

The Postbaccalaureate Fellowship is one of a number of new research fellowships at the institute this fall. Read about all the new scholars who joined the institute for the 2025–26 academic year.

All photos by Peter Ringenberg/University of Notre Dame.