2013 Raven Lecture and Respondent
Beth Richie, 2013 Raven Lecture
Professor of Criminal Justice and Gender and Womens Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
Beth Richie is engaged in several research projects designed to explore the relationship between violence against women in low-income African American communities and violence. The specific focus of one study is girls who are both violent and perpetrators of violence. Another project is looking at the factors that influence recidivism and re-arrest rates for women and young people being released from a large urban jail. A third project is concerned with the public policy and social factors that lead to the rise in incarceration rates of women and conditions of confinement once they are sentenced. Currently Dr. Richie is leading a multi-million dollar research sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation researching women and youth issues at Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She was the recepient of three major awards: the National Advocacy Award by the Department of Health and Health and Human Serivces, Office of Violence Prevention; the Audre Lorde Legacy Award of the Union Institute stemming from her work with the National Network for Women in Prison; and the Visionary Award Of the Violence Intervention Project.
Selected Publications:
With Nicholas Freudenberg. “Linking Women In Jail To Community Services: Factors Associated With Re-arrest and Retention of Drug-Using Women Following Release From Jail”. Journal of American Women’s Medical Association (Spring, l998).
Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women. NY: Routledge. 1996.
“Battered Black Women: A Challenge For the Black Community” in Guy-Sheftall, B. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. NY: The New Press. 1995.
“Gender Entrapment: An Exploratory Study” in Dan, A. Reframing Women’s Health: Multi-disciplinary Research and Practice. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. 1994.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Respondent
Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Kimberlé Crenshaw teaches Civil Rights and other courses in critical race studies and constitutional law. Her primary scholarly interests center around race and the law, and she was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory. She was elected Professor of the Year by the 1991 and 1994 graduating classes. She now splits her time each year between UCLA and the Columbia School of Law.
At the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she received her LL.M., Professor Crenshaw was a William H. Hastie Fellow. She then clerked for Justice Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Professor Crenshaw’s publications include Critical Race Theory (edited by Crenshaw, et al., 1995) and Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (with Matsuda, et al., 1993).
In 2007, Professor Crenshaw was awarded the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil. In 2008, she was nominated an Alphonse Fletcher Fellow. In the same year she joined the selective group of scholars awarded with an in-residence fellowship at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford.
You can find out more about Professor Crenshaw’s work through her think tank, The African American Policy Forum, at http://aapf.org/.
Education:
B.A. Cornell, 1981
J.D. Harvard, 1984
LL.M. University of Wisconsin, 1985
Selected Publications:
Critical Race Theory (edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, et al.). New Press (1995).
Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (with Mari J. Matsuda, et al.).Westview (1993).
From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally About Women, Race, and Social Control, 59 UCLA Law Review 1418 (2012).
Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward, 43 Connecticut Law Review 1253-1352 (2011).
Framing Affirmative Action, 105 Michigan Law Review First Impressions 123 (2007).
A Black Feminist Critique of Antidicrimination Law, in Philosophical Problems in the Law, 4th ed ., 339-343(edited by David M. Adams, Wadsworth, 2005).
The First Decade: Critical Reflections, or A Foot in the Closing Door, 49 UCLA Law Review 1343-72 (2002).
Opening Remarks: Reclaiming Yesterday’s Future, 47 UCLA Law Review 1459-65 (2000).
Playing Race Cards: Constructing a Pro-active Defense of Affirmative Action, 16 National Black Law Journal 196-214 (2000).
Symposium Speaker Bios
Sujatha Baliga
Director, Restorative Justice Project, and Senior Program Specialist
National Council on Crime & Delinquency
Sujatha Baliga’s work is characterized by an equal dedication to victims and persons accused of crime. A former victim’s advocate and public defender, she was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship in 2008, which she used to spearhead a successful restorative juvenile diversion program in Alameda County, CA. As the former director of Community Justice Works, she expanded and institutionalized the program she began through her Soros Fellowship. Baliga has served as a consultant to the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, has taught restorative justice to undergraduates and law students, and is a frequent guest lecturer at academic institutions and conferences.
Today, as director of the restorative justice project at the National Council on Crime and Deliquency, she assists communities in implementing restorative justice alternatives to juvenile detention and zero-tolerance school discipline policies. She also provides technical assistance to the US Attorney General’s Task Force on Childhood Exposure to Violence.
Baliga earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and her JD from the University of Pennsylvania. She has held federal clerkships with the Honorable William K. Sessions, III, former chair of the US Sentencing Commission and with the Honorable Martha Vázquez. A national voice in restorative justice, she was honored as Northeastern University Law School’s Daynard Fellow, featured in the New York Times Magazine, and has been a guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
Alisa Bierria
Associate Director
UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender
Alisa Bierria is the Associate Director of the Center for Race and Gender. Alisa is an award-winning teacher of feminist theory and has over ten years of community organizing experience related to racial and gender justice. She is currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University’s Department of Philosophy. Her dissertation investigates the social and political recognition aspects of human agency. She is co-editor of Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order.
Jennifer Marie Chacón
Professor of Law
UC Irvine School of Law
Jennifer Marie Chacón is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. She teaches courses in statutory analysis, immigration law and policy, criminal law and procedure, and constitutional law. She has written numerous articles and book chapters focusing on the intersection of criminal and immigration law and policy. Her research has been published in various law journals and law reviews, including the Pennsylvania Law Review, the Duke Law Review, the California Law Review, the Wisconsin Law Review and the Fordham Law Review. Professor Chacón received her received her A.B. with Distinction in International Relations from Stanford University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Upon graduating, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Sydney R. Thomas on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She was an attorney with the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City from 1999-2003.
Mimi Kim
UC Berkeley
Mia Mingus
Program Director
generationFIVE
Mia Mingus is a queer physically disabled woman of color, Korean transracial and transnational adoptee writer, organizer and community builder. She was raised in St. Croix, USVI, lived 12 years in Atlanta, GA and has recently moved to Oakland, California. Through her work on disability justice, reproductive justice, queer liberation, and transformative justice; she recognizes the urgency and barriers for oppressed communities to work together and build alliances for liberation. She believes in building community and queer family, healing and transformation. She knows that love, care and how we treat each other (including ourselves) are political. As her work for liberation evolves and deepens, her roots remain firmly planted in ending sexual violence. Mingus is currently working at generationFIVE, an organization working to end child sexual abuse within five generations. At gen5, she is working to create transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse that do not rely on the state (i.e. police, prisons, the criminal legal system) and actively cultivate community safety, resiliency and healing. Before gen5, Mingus was a co-founder and Co-Director of SPARK Reproductive Justice Now, in Atlanta, GA.
Soniya Munshi
Doctoral Student, Sociology and Women’s Studies Departments,
CUNY Graduate Center.
Soniya Munshi is a doctoral student in sociology and women’s studiesy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation examines the relationship between state and domestic violence in South Asia, focusing on the political, economic, and social context of the post-9/11 “War on Terror” and ensuing US militarism. Munshi’s dissertation work is rooted in almost fifteen years of experience working with survivors of violence, in a variety of roles, ranging from providing supportive services in a crisis shelter to supervising program/organizational development in diverse settings, including South Asian and/or queer and trans communities. Munshi is also involved in other social justice efforts, including immigrant rights work and queer/trans activism and organizing. Her academic and activist work engages with the complexities of intimate cruelty and actively forges a relationship between micro and macro levels of violence.
Priscilla Ocen
Associate Professor of Law
Loyola Law School
Priscilla Ocen’s work examines the relationship between race and gender identities and punishment. Prior to joining the faculty at Loyola, Professor Ocen served as the Critical Race Studies Law Fellow at UCLA. While at UCLA she developed a project that examined conditions of confinement within women’s prisons and the race and gender implications of the use of practices such as shackling during labor and childbirth.
Professor Ocen graduated magna cum laude from San Diego State University with a BA in African American Studies and Political Science. Thereafter, she received her JD from UCLA School of Law with a specialization in Critical Race Studies. Upon graduation, Professor Ocen clerked for the Honorable Eric L. Clay of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Detroit, Michigan. Following her clerkship, Professor Ocen served as the Thurgood Marshall Fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she litigated in the areas of voting rights, affirmative action, school desegregation, police misconduct and spearheaded the development of a Black Women’s Reentry Project.
Education:
BA, San Diego State University
JD, University of California Los Angeles, School of Law
Selected Publications:
Punishing Pregnancy: Race, Incarceration and the Shackling of Pregnant Prisoners, 100 Cal. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2012)
The New Racially Restrictive Covenant: Race, Welfare and the Policing of Black Women in Public Housing, 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1540 (2012)
Julia Chinyere Oparah
Professor and Department Head
Ethnic Studies, Mills College
Julia Chinyere Oparah¬formerly Sudbury¬is Professor and Chair of theEthnic Studies Department at Mills College. After a decade of activism in the black women¹s movement in Britain, Oparah moved to California where she became involved in the antiviolence, racial, economic and global justice, and prison abolition movements. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national organization that aims to end mass incarceration and has worked with Incite! Women of Color; most recently, she co-founded Black Women Birthing Justice. She also helped establish the Queer Studies Program at Mills College, and is working to build a vision of gender justice at the College that centers transgender inclusion. Oparah has written and edited several books including Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women¹s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation, Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial Complex, Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism and Social Change, Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption and Color of Violence: The Incite Anthology. She lives in East Oakland with her partner and two-year old daughter and is currently working on a participatory action research project on black women¹s experiences of childbirth.
Clarissa Rojas
Professor of Chicano & Latino Studies
California State University, Long Beach
(Ana) Clarissa Rojas Durazo spent her childhood in Mexicali, Mexico and Calexico, California. Her family immigrated to Chula Vista, California when she was 12. Her father’s family is from Guadalajara, Jalisco and her mother’s family is from Magdalena, Sonora and Nogales and Douglas, Arizona. Rojas received her PhD in (Medical) Sociology at UC San Francisco. She holds a M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in Women’s Studies and Chicano Studies from UC Santa Cruz.
Prior to arriving at Cal State Long Beach, Clarissa taught for 9 years in Raza Studies, Ethnic Studies, Urban Studies, and Sociology at San Francisco State University. She also taught in Latin American Studies and Sociology at the University of San Francisco and in Chicana Studies at UC Davis.
Her current research explores young Latinas’ experiences with and conceptualizations of multiple and intersecting manifestations of violence. Her transdisciplinary research and teaching interests include: Violence; Sex/Gender/Sexuality Studies; Race/Racialities; Chicana, Latina, Latin American, Zapatista, Transnational, Decolonizing/Post-Colonial, and Women of Color Literatures, Feminisms and Movements; Globalization, Border and Migration Studies; Sociology of Health and Illness, Medical Violence and Latina Health; Cultural Studies.
Rojas co-edited Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology., http://www.southendpress.org/2005/items/8762X. Her article “Fighting Violence Against Women and the Fourth World War” appears in The Revolution will Not be Funded: The NonProfit Industrial Complex, which was awarded the 2007 Gustav Myers Outstanding Award for Advancing Human Rights. http://www.southendpress.org/2006/items/87662. Rojas serves on the Editorial Board of Chicana/Latina Studies: the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) http://malcs.net/journal.htm. Her poetry has been published in literary journals in Mexico and the U.S.
Rojas is a long-term community activist and organizer. Her community work has focused on resisting and transforming violence against and within raza and communities of color. She has been invited to speak throughout the United States and internationally and is available for a wide variety of speaking engagements. She co-founded INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, and serves as Commissioner on CSULB’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women. She practices rebel dignity, believes in caracoles, and trusts the creative spirit.
Jonathan Simon
Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law
In 2010 Professor Simon was named to the Adrian A Kragen Professor of Law, a chair named in memory of one of Boalt Hall’s great 20th century scholar/teachers who died in 2005.
Before joining the Boalt Hall faculty in 2003, Simon was a professor at the University of Miami School of Law. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan from 1990 to 1992. He clerked for the Honorable Judge William C. Canby Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1988-89).
In Spring 2011, Simon was appointed the Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Law, University of Edinburgh, School of Law.
Simon teaches courses on criminal law, criminal justice, law and culture, risk and the law, and socio-legal studies. His scholarship concerns the role of criminal justice and punishment in modern societies, insurance and other contemporary practices of governing risk, the cultural lives of law, and the intellectual history of law and the social sciences. Simon is a faculty associate of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice.
Simon’s books include Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990 (1993) and Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007), winner of the 2008 Book Prize of the Sociology of Law section of the ASA and the 2010 Hindelang Prize of the American Society of Criminology. He also the co-editor of Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (with Tom Baker, 2002) Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving Beyond Legal Realism (with Austin Sarat, 2003); After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy and the New Reconstruction (with Mary Louise Frampton and Ian Haney Lopez, 2008).
His most recent books, Mass Incarceration on Trial: Courts and the Future of American Prisons (New Press forthcoming), and The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society (SAGE forthcoming, co-edited with Richard Sparks) will be published in 2013.
Simon is a member of the Law & Society Association where he has served on the Board of Trustees and the Executive Committee. He is also a member of the American Society of Criminology and the American Sociological Association. Simon has served as co-editor-in-chief and serves as an editorial board member of Punishment & Society and has served as an associate editor of Law & Society Review.
Education:
A.B., UC Berkeley (1981)
J.D., UC Berkeley (Boalt Hall) (1987)
Ph.D., UC Berkeley (Boalt Hall) (1990)
Dean Spade
Associate Professor of Law
Seattle University School of Law
Dean Spade is an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law. He teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, and Law and Social Movements. Prior to joining the faculty of Seattle University, Dean was a Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law School and Harvard Law School, teaching classes related to sexual orientation and gender identity law and law and social movements.
In 2002, Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. SRLP also engages in litigation, policy reform and public education on issues affecting these communities and operates on a collective governance model, prioritizing the governance and leadership of trans, intersex, and gender non-conforming people of color. While working at SRLP, Dean taught classes focusing on sexual orientation, gender identity and law at Columbia and Harvard Law Schools.
From 1998-2006, Spade co-edited the paper and online zine, Make. He is currently the co-editor of the online journal, Enough, which focuses on the personal politics of wealth redistribution.
He is currently a fellow in the “Engaging Tradition” project at Columbia Law School. His book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law was published in 2011.
Emily Thuma
Western Washington University
Emily Thuma is a PhD candidate in American Studies at NYU. Her teaching and research interests include twentieth century U.S. social and cultural history; gender, race and sexuality studies; intellectual history and grassroots activisms; politics of sexual violence; historiography; and progressive pedagogy. Her dissertation examines community-based activist efforts to curb sexual and domestic violence at their intersections with the racial politics of criminalization and imprisonment in the United States since 1968