Joel Sati

Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship awarded in 2018 to pursue a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at University of California, Berkeley and a JD at Yale University.

Joel Sati is an immigrant from Kenya.

About Joel Sati

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Joel Sati immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. Early on, Sati's mother worked night and double shifts at a Kennesaw, Georgia gas station to make ends meet.

In January 2012, Sati's mother put money together and recommended that he attend Montgomery College where he received his associate's degree. His courses in philosophy provided the language and lens to understand law and immigration, which became his professional focus.

Sati continued his college education, activism, and research at the City College of New York (CCNY). While a student, Joel was a youth organizer for African Communities Together, where he mobilized African youth around immigration issues. He also codesigned and cotaught a black political thought course at CCNY that explored texts such as The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins, The Racial Contract by Charles Mills, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The course is now a permanent offering in CCNY’s Political Science Department.

Sati finished his PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy after receiving his JD from Yale Law School, where he was the Symposium Editor for the Yale Journal for Law and the Humanities. Sati’s dissertation project, titled A Punishment of the Severest Kind: Deportations, Rights, and the Rise of a New Criminal Law, examines the intersection of criminal law and immigration law through a philosophical lens. He was a 2019 recipient of the Thomas I. Yamashita FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE Prize, an award given to a scholar-activist in California whose work bridges the gap between the academy and activism.