Violence and Race

President & CEO, WURD
Moderator, Race and Violence

Lomax-Reese is the President and CEO of WURD Radio, LLC, Pennsylvania’s only African-American owned talk radio station. She is also the co-founder of The Next Majority, LLC, a new multicultural data and analytics company that seeks to develop the most comprehensive repository of open source and proprietary information about communities of color in the United States. Prior to her work with WURD and The Next Majority, Sara co-founded HealthQuest: Total Wellness for Body, Mind & Spirit, the first nationally circulated African-American consumer health magazine in the country.

Classes

• Class 5: Violence and Race

Assistant Professor, School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Kerrison’s mixed-method research agenda explores punishment structures and prisoner reentry outcomes, in addition to disparities in health, education, and employment outcomes for former prisoners. She investigates the extent to which collateral consequences legislation shapes desistance among a contemporary mixed-race, mixed-gender, and drug-involved reentry cohort. Since joining Penn Law’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, her work explores systematic racial bias in the plea bargaining process and subsequent sentencing outcomes for indigent defendants in San Francisco County. Principal questions explore: whether racial disparities exist in plea offers, whether individuals held in custody pending trial are compelled to accept plea bargain offers, and what impact the race of justice system actors may have on criminal cases resolved by plea bargain. Dr. Kerrison’s research is relevant for urgent criminal justice policy agendas aimed at improving reintegration, public safety, and social equity.

Select Resources

• "White Claims to Illness and the Race-Based Medicalization of Addiction for Drug-Involved Former Prisoners" in Harvard Journal on Racial & Ethnic Justice (2015) [pdf]

Classes

• Class 5: Violence and Race

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Penn Program on Race, Science and Society, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Rollins’ research intersects three strands of sociological study: medical sociology; science, knowledge & technology; and race/ethnicity and racism. Currently, he is working on completing a book manuscript from his dissertation research concerning the social and ethical implications of neuroscience research on violent and aggressive behaviors. This research examines how neuroimaging research on the determinants of violence and aggression are formulated and structured; traces how neuroscientists understand and use race in their research on violent and aggressive behaviors; and explores the continued controversies, rebuttals and uncertainties surrounding technoscientific research of and biomedical interventions for violence and aggression. In addition, he has research and teaching interests in: racial/gendered inequalities in health, violence prevention strategies and policy, and knowledge production in biomedicine, criminal justice, and public health.

Classes

• Class 5: Violence and Race

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Professor Smith is a socio-cultural anthropologist who researches the reverberating effects of police violence on black families, particularly black women. Christen’s work focuses on engendered anti-Black state violence and Black communities’ responses to it in Brazil and the Americas. She is particularly interested in transnational anti-Black police violence, Black liberation struggles, the paradox of Black citizenship in the Americas, and the dialectic between the enjoyment of Black culture and the killing of Black people. Her work in Brazil uses the lens of performance to examine the immediate and long-term impact of police violence on Black people and Black community responses to this violence. Her more recent, comparative work examines the lingering, deadly impact of police violence on black women in Brazil and the U.S.

Select Resources

• "Facing the Dragon: Black Mothering, Sequelae, and Gendered Necropolitics in the Americas" in Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists (2016) [pdf]

• "Slow Death: Is the trauma of police violence killing black women?" in The Conversation (2016)

• Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil [for purchase]

Classes

• Class 3: Genetics and Race

Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Moderator, Geography, Culture, and Race

Deborah A. Thomas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica, and is co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Thomas also directed and produced the documentary film Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. She is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.

Select Resources

• Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica [for purchase]

• Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

• “The Violence of Diaspora: Governmentality, Class Cultures, and Circulations” in Radical History Review (2009) [pdf]

Classes

• Class 4: Geography, Culture, and Race
• Class 5: Violence and Race

Academic Director, Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice
Senior Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Paul Heaton is a Senior Fellow and Academic Director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice. Much of his research aims to apply methodological insights from economics to inform issues in legal and criminal justice policy. An expert on legal and regulatory program and policy evaluation, Dr. Heaton’s criminal justice work spans a wide range of areas, including measurement of impacts of criminal justice interventions; applications of cost-benefit analysis to CJ programs; and evaluations of the CJ implications of public policies related to controlled substances. His work on policing, courts, and drug offending has been widely cited by policymakers and the media. He has also published numerous empirical studies of tort law and insurance regulation. Dr. Heaton’s work is strongly cross-disciplinary, and he has co-authored papers with legal scholars, psychologists, statisticians, physicians, criminologists, and sociologists. His research has been published in leading scholarly journals such as the Yale Law Journal, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, and American Journal of Public Health. Prior to joining Penn Law, Heaton served as the Director of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice and Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Select Resources

• Understanding the Effects of Anti-Profiling Policies

• Victim Compensation Funds and Tort Litigation Following Incidents of Mass Violence

• The Downstream Consequences of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention

Classes

• Class 5: Violence and Race