Reinventing Police

Conference Speakers

Simon Balto (Department of History, University of Iowa)
Department website: https://clas.uiowa.edu/history/people/simon-balto
Email: simon-balto@uiowa.edu
Simon Balto teaches, researches, and writes about African American history in the United States. His first book, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), explores the development of a police system in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods that over the course of the mid-twentieth century became simultaneously brutally repressive and neglectful. His writing has also appeared in TIME magazine, The Washington PostThe Progressive, the Journal of African American HistoryLabor, and numerous other popular and scholarly outlets.

 

Monica Bell (Yale Law School)
Department website: https://law.yale.edu/monica-c-bell
Email: monica.bell@yale.edu
Monica Bell is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her areas of expertise include criminal justice, welfare law, housing, race and the law, qualitative research methods, and law and sociology.

 

Sarah Brayne (Department of Sociology, UT-Austin)
Department website: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sociology/faculty/sb49337
Email: sbrayne@utexas.edu
Sarah Brayne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. In her research, Brayne uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the social consequences of data-intensive surveillance practices. Her forthcoming book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford University Press), draws on years of ethnographic research of the Los Angeles Police Department to understand how law enforcement uses predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies. In previous research, she analyzed the relationship between criminal justice contact and involvement in medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions. Brayne’s research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. 

 

Tai Davidson Bajandas (University of Chicago)
Tai Davidson is an English/Gender and Sexuality major at the college at the University of Chicago.

 

Adam Elliott-Cooper (Research Associate, University of Greenwich, UK)
Department website: https://www.gre.ac.uk/people/rep/fach/dr-adam-elliott-cooper
Email: a.elliottcooper@greenwich.ac.uk
Adam Elliott-Cooper received his PhD from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, in 2016. He has previously worked as a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at UCL, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and as a research associate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.

 

Yanilda Maria Gonzalez (Harvard Kennedy School of Government)
Department website: https://scholar.harvard.edu/yanilda/home
Email: gonzalez@hks.harvard.edu
Yanilda Maria Gonzalez is a Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. My research interests are broadly focused on questions of state capacity and citizenship. My regional focus on Latin America allows me to explore these questions in the context of new democracies, high levels of crime and violence, as well as profound inequalities. My current research examines the politics of coercive institutions in democracies.

 

Daanika Gordon (Department of Sociology, Tufts University)
Department website: https://as.tufts.edu/sociology/people/faculty/gordon
Email: Daanika.Gordon@tufts.edu
Daanika Gordon’s research explores the intersections of race, space, and the law. Her current project analyzes the relationships between racial segregation and policing. Using several data sources, including ethnographic observation of police work, she describes how the police respond to and shape unequal urban landscapes. In previous projects, Daanika has studied how racial typifications of neighborhoods permeate individuals’ daily mobility patterns and how institutional practices in a drug court impact clients’ pathways through the program. Her research has appeared in journals including Sociological Perspectives, Socius, and The South Carolina Law Review.

 

Alicia Hurtado (University of Chicago)
Alicia Hurtado is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Chicago studying Sociology and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and current intern at the Chicago Abortion Fund. As a Sociology Department research assistant and a student of the University, Alicia aims to understand the ways that knowledge production can support social movements, and how institutions of higher education are implicated in community harm. In her free time, Alicia is a student organizer with #CareNotCops, where she focuses on building people power to defund, disarm, and disband the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD). In all of her work, Alicia
strives to push the boundaries of what is possible by using an abolitionist lens, and is dedicated to building communities of care and spaces to imagine a truly liberatory future for all people.

 

Alice Kim (UChicago Pozen Family Center for Human Rights)
Department website: https://humanrights.uchicago.edu/people/alice-kim
Email: alicekim@uchicago.edu
Alice Kim is Director of Human Rights Practice at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. She directs the Human Rights Lab and teaches courses on contemporary issues in human rights practice. During its initial three years, the Lab will engage students, scholars, and community in human rights work addressing mass incarceration and racialized policing.  Kim writes, teaches, and organizes around access to education for people who are incarcerated, capital punishment, police torture, and the prison system. She teaches at a maximum-security prison and leads the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project’s community-building efforts connecting scholars, teaching artists, and community leaders with incarcerated students.

 

Jens Ludwig (Harris School of Public Policy, and Crime Lab, UChicago)
Department website: https://harris.uchicago.edu/directory/jens-ludwig
Email: jludwig@uchicago.edu
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, codirector of the Education Lab, and codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working group on the economics of crime. In the area of urban poverty, Ludwig has participated since 1995 on the evaluation of a HUD-funded randomized residential-mobility experiment known as Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which provides low-income public housing families the opportunity to relocate to private-market housing in less disadvantaged neighborhoods. In the area of education he has written extensively about early childhood interventions, and about the role of social conditions in affecting children’s schooling outcomes. In the area of crime, Ludwig has written extensively about gun-violence prevention. Through the Crime Lab he is also involved in partnering with policymakers in Chicago, New York City, and across the country to use tools from social science, behavioral science, and computer science to identify effective (and cost-effective) ways to help prevent crime and violence. This includes studies of various social programs, helping the Chicago Police Department use data to reduce gun violence and strengthen police-community relations, and work underway to use data science to help New York City build and implement a new pretrial risk tool as part of the city’s goal to close Riker’s Island.

Anna Lvovsky (Harvard Law School)
Department website: https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/11714/Lvovsky
Email: alvovsky@law.harvard.edu
Anna Lvovsky is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches American legal history, the history of policing, criminal law, and evidence. Professor Lvovsky’s scholarship focuses on the legal and cultural dimensions of policing, judicial uses of professional knowledge, and the regulation of gender, sexuality, and morality. Her recent work examines judicial deference to police expertise and the role of moral judgment in the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

 

Philip McHarris (Department of Sociology, Yale University)
*recently featured on HBO’s “Axios” show discussing policing)
Department website: https://sociology.yale.edu/people/philip-v-mcharris
Email: philip.mcharris@yale.edu
Philip V. McHarris is a joint PhD candidate in Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on race, punishment, and policing, drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods. His dissertation explores the strategies that residents of a high-rise housing project in Brooklyn, NY employ to foster safety and disrupt police violence. Philip is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He holds a B.A. in sociology from Boston College.

 

Reuben Miller (School of Social Service Administration, UChicago)
Department website: https://ssa.uchicago.edu/ssascholars/r-miller
Email: reuben@uchicago.edu
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (SSA). His research examines life at the intersections of race, poverty, crime control, and social welfare policy. He is completing a book, titled Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends. Dr. Miller has conducted fieldwork in Chicago, Detroit, and New York City, examining how law, policy and emergent practices of state and third-party supervision changed the contours of citizenship, activism, community, and family life for poor black Americans and the urban poor more broadly. To capture the effects of crime control on social life in global cities with different public policies, Miller conducts ongoing fieldwork in Glasgow, London and Belgrade. He is currently conducting research on the “moral worlds” of people we’ve deemed violent and will launch a comparative study of punishment and social welfare policy in the port cities that were most involved in the transatlantic slave trade.

 

Andrew Papachristos (Department of Sociology, Northwestern)
Department website: https://www.sociology.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core/andrew-v.–papachristos-.html
Email: avp@northwestern.edu
Andrew V.  Papachristos is currently Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Northwestern Network and Neighborhood Initiative. Papachristos aims to understand how the connected nature of cities—how their citizens, neighborhoods, and institutions are tied to one another—affect what we feel, think, and do. His main research applies network science to the study of gun violence, police misconduct, illegal gun markets, Al Capone, street gangs, and urban neighborhoods. He is also in the process of completing a manuscript on the evolution of black street gangs and politics in Chicago from the 1950s to the early-2000s. Papachristos is also actively involved in policy related research, including the evaluation of gun violence prevention programs in more than a dozen U.S. cities. An author of more than 50 articles, Papachristos’ work has appeared in journals such as JAMA, The American Sociological Review, Criminology, The American Journal of Public Health, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune, among other outlets. Papachristos was awarded an NSF Early CAREER award to examine how violence spreads through high-risk social networks in several U.S. cities.

 

Michelle Phelps (Department of Sociology, Minnesota)
Department website: https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/phelps
Email: phelps@umn.edu
Prof. Phelps’ research is in the sociology of punishment, focusing in particular on the punitive turn in the U.S. Much of her work focuses on the rise of probation supervision as a criminal justice sanction and its relationship to mass incarceration. She has also examined a variety of criminal justice topics, including changes in rehabilitative programming in U.S. prisons since the 1970s and the recent decarceration trend and its implications for inequality. Together with Prof. Joshua Page and Philip Goodman, she is the author of Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice. Her new projects focus on policing, police reform, and community supervision and health.

 

Stephen Raudenbush (Department of Sociology, UChicago)
Website: https://voices.uchicago.edu/raudenbush/
Email: sraudenb@uchicago.edu
Stephen Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology, the College and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies and Chairman of the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. He is interested in statistical models for child and youth development within social settings such as classrooms, schools, and neighborhoods. He is best known for his work developing hierarchical linear models, with broad applications in the design and analysis of longitudinal and multilevel research. he is currently studying the development of literacy and math skills in early childhood with implications for instruction; and methods for assessing school and classroom quality. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the recipient of the American Educational Research Association award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research.

 

Rossana Rodríguez Sanchez (Alderwoman, 33rd Ward of the City of Chicago)
Website: https://33rdward.org/
Email: Info@33rdward.org (ask Julian for personal email)
Rossana Rodríguez Sanchez is a Chicago politician and community organizer. She is the alderwoman of Chicago’s 33rd ward, having taken office as a member of the Chicago City Council in May 2019. She won election to that office after defeating incumbent Deb Mell in the 2019 Chicago aldermanic elections.

 

Stuart Schrader (Sociology, Johns Hopkins University)
Department website: https://soc.jhu.edu/directory/stuart-schrader/
Email: stuart.schrader@jhu.edu
Stuart Schrader is a Lecturer / Assistant Research Scientist in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, teaching courses in Africana Studies, International Studies, Political Science, and Sociology. He is also the Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship. And I am affiliated with the 21st Century Cities initiative at Hopkins. His book, published with University of California Press in Fall 2019, is titled Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. His research interests cluster around a few domains: security, policing, and counterinsurgency; the entwinement of foreign and domestic policy; and urbanization. His broad theoretical and methodological agenda is to connect these domains through a critical analysis of race and racism.

 

Alyasah “Ali” Sewell (Department of Sociology, Emory University)
Department website: http://sociology.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/sewell-alyasah.html
Email: aasewel@emory.edu
Alyasah “Ali” Sewell (they/them/their) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University and Founder and Director of The Race and Policing Project. Advancing quantitative approaches to racism studies, they assess empirical links between the political economy of race and racial health(care) disparities using policing and housing policy data. Published in a wide array of sociological and interdisciplinary outlets, their research garnered support and recognition from the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Baden-Württemberg Foundation, and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Planned Parenthood named them, “The Future: Innovator and Visionary Who Will Transform Black Communities”. They received their Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Indiana University with a minor in Social Science Research Methods and their B.A. summa cum laude in Sociology from the University of Florida with a minor in Women’s Studies.

 

Wesley Skogan (Department of Political Science, Northwestern)
Department website: https://www.polisci.northwestern.edu/people/emeritus-faculty/wesley-skogan.html
Email: skogan@northwestern.edu
Wesley G. Skogan holds a joint appointment in Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research. His most recent books on policing are:  Police and Community in Chicago, and  Community Policing: Can It Work? Prof. Skogan was co-editor of a policy-oriented report from the National Research Council, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence, and he chaired the committee that produced it. Another line of his research includes crime prevention; this led to his book Coping with Crime, and a number of articles on community responses to crime. Prof. Skogan has also been involved in research on criminal victimization and the evaluation of service programs for victims. He received the 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award in Evidence-Based Crime Policy from the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. This award is the center’s highest honor and recognizes individuals who have made a significant contribution and commitment to advance the integration of science with criminal justice practice. This award celebrates CEBCP’s core values of doing rigorous science and translating research into practice. The award was presented at the Annual Symposium of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University.

 

Seth Stoughton (University of South Carolina Law School)
Department website: https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/law/faculty_and_staff/directory/stoughton_seth.php
Email: swstough@law.sc.edu
Seth Stoughton is an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where he is affiliated with the Rule of Law Collaborative. He studies policing and how it is regulated, and his scholarship has appeared in the Minnesota Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and other top journals. He has written multiple book chapters and is the principal co-author of Evaluating Police Uses of Force (forthcoming from NYU Press in spring 2020).  He is a frequent lecturer on policing issues, regularly appears on national and international media, and has written for The New York TimesThe AtlanticTIME, and other news publications. He teaches Police Law & Policy, Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law, and the Regulation of Vice.

 

Forrest Stuart (Department of Sociology, Stanford University)
Department website: https://sociology.stanford.edu/people/forrest-stuart
Email: fstuart@stanford.edu
Forrest Stuart is currently Associate Professor of Sociology and the director of the Stanford Ethnography Lab. An urban ethnographer, he uses fieldwork, archival, and other qualitative methods to investigate the causes, contours, and consequences of urban poverty. In the spirit of the Chicago School of Sociology, he pays close attention to the ways that individuals and communities make sense of their social worlds. This agenda has led to number of original research projects, community organizing efforts, and intervention programs. He makes efforts to embrace the ideals of public sociology, which enlists community members as valuable co-producers of knowledge.

 

Kalfani Ture (Criminal Justice, Quinnipiac University)
Departmental website: https://directory.qu.edu/Profile/184476
Email: Kalfani.Ture@quinnipiac.edu
Kalfani Nyerere Ture is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Quinnipiac University. Ture is a practicing urban ethnographer, with a focus on race, place, urban crime and urban ethnography. In between undergraduate and graduate school, he engaged in an informal participatory project of law enforcement agencies at the municipal, county and state level believing that as an aspiring ethnographer of crime and place, he could offer a more informed perspective and pedagogy on the American criminal justice system and racialize communities. As a result of his folk ethnographic undertaking, he was certified in basic law enforcement and sheriff deputy through a Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training academy (Fulton County). He enjoyed a short tenure as a practicing police officer and jailer and with this professional experience, he provides invaluable insights into the wide range of police practices as well as a unique perspective on the licensing of law enforcement agencies to police and socially control communities and people of color (referred in his writing as non-western inferior others). Ture draws on his experience as a law enforcement officer and urban ethnographer to demonstrate the relationship of race and place to policing and the criminal justice system.

 

Robert Vargas (Department of Sociology, UChicago)
Department website: https://sociology.uchicago.edu/directory/robert-vargas-1
Email: robvargas@uchicago.edu
Professor Vargas’ research examines how laws, politics, and bureaucracies shape the conditions of cities, with a particular focus on violence and health care. His multi award-winning book “Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio” brings political sociology to the study of urban violence by showing how ward redistricting shapes levels of block-level violence in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. He has also published in a variety of journals such as Criminology, Social Science and Medicine, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

 

Alex Vitale (School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing)
Department website: https://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/news/faculty-experts/vitale-alex.php
Email: avitale@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Alex S. Vitale is professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in The New York TimesThe NationNY Daily News, and USA Today.

 

Damon Williams
Website: https://airgoradio.com/about-damon
Email: contact@airgoradio.com
Damon is an organizer, writer, rapper, poet, comedian, and educator from the south side of Chicago, and the Co-Host and Co-Executive Producer of AirGo. He is the cofounder of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, a grassroots alliance of artists, journalists, and activists harnessing creative capital and cultural production to deconstruct injustice in America and worldwide.The Collective operates the Breathing Room, a Black-led liberation space for arts, organizing, and healing on Chicago’s South Side. Williams started acting at a young age in many commercials and movies, including an ad for the Jordan Brand starring and directed by Spike Lee, and the feature length film RollBounce.  He attended Grinnell College, where he found his voice as a performer of spoken word poetry and as the creator and co-host of KDIC 88.5’s weekly hip-hop radio show The BoomBox, which was accompanied by an online talk show of the same name.  He graduated in 2014 with degrees in Economics and Sociology. Williams has led community outreach and seminars aimed at youth for over ten years, encouraging financial literacy and combating growing economic inequality in urban America.

 

Musab Younis (Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London)
Department website: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/staff/profiles/younismusab.html
Email: m.younis@qmul.ac.uk
Musab joined QMUL in September 2018. His research examines international political thought in relation to empire, with a focus on anticolonialism. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on conceptions of race and global order across the interwar Black Atlantic. Before joining QMUL, Musab was a Lecturer at Cardiff University (2017-18). He obtained his MPhil (2010-12) and DPhil (2013-17) at the University of Oxford and worked as a Research Officer at the Institute of Development Studies (2012-13).