Directed by Ava DuVernay, English, 100 minutes, USA, 2016
Zoom ID: 93509899378
Live captioning will be provided.
Panelists:
Jenn Jackson, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University
Jenn M. Jackson (they/them) is a queer genderflux androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson’s primary research is in Black Politics with a focus on group threat, gender and sexuality, political behavior, and social movements. Jackson also holds affiliate positions in African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and LGBT Studies. They are a Senior Research Associate at The Campbell Public Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, as well.
Jackson is the author of the forthcoming book BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US (Random House Press, 2022). The book is an intellectual and political history of Black women’s activism, movement organizing, and philosophical work that explores how women from Harriet Jacobs to Audre Lorde to the members of the Combahee River Collective, among others, have for centuries taught us how to fight for justice and radically reimagine a more just world for us all.
Jackson’s first academic book project POLICING BLACKNESS investigates the role of group threat in influencing Black Americans’ political behavior. Methodologically, they utilize quantitative analyses of survey data and experiments as well as qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with young Black Americans ages 18 to 35 to investigate both intergroup and intragroup differences in responses to and ideas about group threat.
Michael Cox, Black and Pink (United States prison abolitionist organization supporting LGBTQ+ and HIV-positive prisoners)
Michael Cox (he/him) is a butch queen on a two-fold mission to dismantle the prison system and to find alternatives to the ways society governs through crime. His work is informed by his lived experience in the prison system, his scholarship, and the endless stream of letters from our inside members. You can often find him in policy spaces or building community with other people who have been directly impacted with the criminal legal system.
Michael was appointed by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office to serve on the Special Commission on the Health and Safety of LGTBQI Prisoners, tasked with investigating the correctional system. At the federal level, he co-chairs the National LGBT / HIV Criminal Justice Working Group’s formerly incarcerated subgroup. He is a board member for MassEquality and was a 2020 Fellow of JustLeadershipUSA’s Leading with Conviction leadership training program. He has worked with Black and Pink in a variety of roles since 2014.
Carla Shedd, Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Education, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Shedd’s research and teaching focuses on: education; criminalization and criminal justice; race and ethnicity; law; social inequality; and urban policy. Shedd’s first book, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice (October 2015, Russell Sage), has won multiple academic awards, including the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award, which is given to the top social-science book in the field of social inequality. Unequal City examines Chicago public school students' perceptions of injustice and contact with police within and across various schools and neighborhoods, and deeply probes the intersections of race, place, education, and the expansion of the American carceral state. Shedd’s second book project, When Protection and Punishment Collide: America’s Juvenile Court System and the Carceral Continuum, draws on her one-of-a-kind empirical data to interrogate the deftly intertwined contexts of NYC schools, neighborhoods, and juvenile justice courts, in this dynamic moment of NYC public policy shifts (e.g., school (re-)segregation, “Raise the Age,” and “Close Rikers.”).
Dr. Shedd received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University, and graduated from Smith College with a double major in Economics and African American Studies. Fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, Columbia University, and Northwestern University have supported Shedd's research and writing. Shedd has been featured on MSNBC, C-SPAN's Washington Journal, PBS NewsHour, and WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show; and her work has been written about in several major publication outlets.
Moderator Janhavi Madabushi, Executive Director, Mass Bail Fund
janhavi madabushi (they/them) is a community organizer and creative whose work whittles away at carceral cultures to create thriving, healing futures. As an abolitionist and Queer anarchist they approach their work in limitlessly imaginative ways. In practice, that means committing to shifting the material conditions of oppressed people while militantly practicing joy making, pleasure & expression. They are the incoming director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund.
You can watch the film 13th on your own time before the panel, or join the screening