This year, the CLS Graduate Students invited Professor Nikki Jones to visit the department, where she met individually with graduate students and presented her current work. Professor Jones is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC-Berkeley. Her research, writing, and teaching focuses on the experiences of African American men, women and youth with the criminal justice system, policing, and with various forms of violence. Professor Jones’ areas of expertise include urban ethnography, race and ethnic relations and criminology and criminal justice, with a special emphasis on the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Her work uses a critical and intersectional lens to investigate many of the injustices that occur within American society, and does so with the hope of improving the lives of many Americans impacted by racialized and gendered policies and practices. This visit fostered many discussions about the impact of race in the criminal justice system, diversity in academia, and the many paths graduate students can pursue in an effort to produce rigorous scholarship.
