PhD Candidates on the Job Market

Meghan Ballard

1. Dissertation Title: "Language Access in the Criminal Legal System: The Bureaucratic Interpretation, Organizational Construction, and Administrative Enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964"

2. Dissertation Committee: Mona Lynch (Chair), Bryan L. Sykes (Cornell University), Shauhin Talesh (UCI Law)

3. Research Interests: Law & Society, Access to Justice, Race & Justice, Civil Rights, Language Rights, Inequality/Social Stratification, Criminology, Research Methodology

4. CV: here

5. Website: https://sites.uci.edu/mmballard/

Joanne DeCaro

1. Dissertation Title: Unnamed Wounds: Carceral Trauma and Wellness in Reentry

2. Dissertation Committee: Keramet Reiter (Chair), Christopher Seeds, Mona Lynch, Alyson K. Zalta, Roxanne Varzi

3. Research Interests: trauma and incarceration, life and long-term sentences, aging and death in prison, moral injury and moral emotions, trauma-informed care, healing spaces, social and psychological aspects of reentry, ethics of carceral research

4. CV: here

5. Website: https://sites.uci.edu/joannedecaro/

Courtney M. Echols

Working Dissertation Title: From Cotton Fields to Courtrooms: Afterlives of Historical Anti-Black Violence and the Evolution of Police as Guardians of the Racial Order from Chattel Slavery to Contemporary Racial Carcerality
Dissertation Committee: (co-chairs) Geoff Ward and Kirk Williams; Kaaryn Gustafson; Bryan Sykes
Research Interests: Race and Racism, Historical Anti-Black Violence, State Violence, Transitional Justice, Reparations, Collective Memory, Policing, Abolition, Community-Based Research
CV: here
Website Link: CourtneyMEchols.com

Courtney Echols, a system impacted and first generation college student, is a community organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an abolitionist organization working to empower communities to fight against surveillance in all its forms. Courtney also co-founded UCI4COLA and the Orange County Mutual Aid Collective, which centers radical BIPOC political agendas and struggles through direct action, advocacy, mobilization, and education. Courtney is currently in the joint JD/PhD program at the University of California, Irvine, where she is a PhD candidate in Criminology, Law & Society and a third year law student. She holds a Masters degree in Social Ecology from UC Irvine where she also received her B.A., graduating Summa Cum Laude and having tripled majored in the fields of Criminology, Law & Society, Psychology & Social Behavior, and Social Ecology. Courtney’s research centers on documenting historical anti-Black violence in the US and intervening in its legacies, with a particular focus on Louisiana, her home state. Her research also examines contemporary manifestations of anti-Black histories, especially anti-Black racism and oppressive conditions within the contexts of policing and the criminal legal system. She previously had the privilege of interning at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, where she aided in efforts to remedy racially violent histories within Louisiana and Mississippi. Courtney’s work, as both a community organizer and researcher, is rooted in two core principles: 1.) Once Black people get free, everybody gets free. 2.) to know the present, we must understand the history.

Margaret Goldman

1. Dissertation Title: "Freeing Los Angeles: Un/forgotten Spaces and Abolitionist Education in the Carceral-Education Landscape"

2. Dissertation Committee: Nancy Rodriguez (Chair), Susan Coutin, Sabina Vaught (University of Pittsburgh, Education)

3. Research Interests: Schools and Prisons; Race, Gender and Carcerality; Juvenile Justice; Youth and Family Criminalization; Legal Decision-Making; Anti-Carceral Feminisms; Abolition; Critical Criminology; Community-Based Research

4. CV: here

5. Website: https://sites.uci.edu/margaretgoldman/

Ekaterina Moiseeva

1. Dissertation Title: "The Legalization of Cannabis in California: A Critical View on Socio-Legal Change"

2. Dissertation Committee: Christopher Seeds (chair), Mona Lynch, Susan Coutin, Swethaa Ballakrishnen

3. Research Interests: Law & Society, Sociology of Law, Criminology, Economic Sociology, Sociology of Professions, Ethnography, Mixed Methods, Critical Studies, Drug Studies, Neoliberalism, Legal Profession, Legal Education

4. CV: here

5. Website: https://sites.uci.edu/emoiseeva/