CRIMINALIZATION IN DAILY LIFE PANELISTS
Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad |
Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad is an Assistant Professor and Celebrity Instructor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University in Washington, DC. Dr. Muhammad is an innovative educator that utilizes a radical pedagogy to engage students in an intellectual journey that is described as, “empowering”, “transformative”, “critical” and “freeing”. Her classes have been dubbed the “Dr. Muhammad Experience” and have won her the title of Professor of the Year 2014, 2015 and 2016. Dr. Muhammad is the first teacher anywhere in the world to have students sleep in prison as a required part of their course curriculum. In addition, Dr. Muhammad voluntarily lived in a cell for a weekend (January 15-17, 2016) to gain a more holistic understanding of life behind prison walls. Dr. Muhammad is a unique educator working strategically to change the landscape of higher education, as it is known today. Dr. Muhammad was recently nominated for the very prestigious Global Teachers Prize for her groundbreaking instruction. This year she is nominated for the 2018 Female Faculty of the Year from the National HBCU Digest Awards. Her newest revolutionary course, the only of its kind in the world, Policing Inside Out initiated through a partnership with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, brings together law enforcement officers and black millennials to engage in brutally honest dialogue, trust building excursions and critical readings on minority community-police relations.
For more than a decade, Dr. Muhammad has been conducting groundbreaking research on the children of incarcerated parents and the consequences of parental incarceration on children. Dr. Muhammad has done hundreds of interviews with affected children and parents in the United States, Uganda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. She has published research on the impact of parental incarceration - from witnessing a parent’s arrest by police to the physical and emotional separation resulting from actual incarceration - on children, their parents, and familial bonds, as well as children’s success stories, children of incarcerated parents' attitudes toward police, and the ways in which the strengthening of parent-child bonds through communication and prison programming can reduce recidivism among incarcerated parents. |
Dr. Odis Johnson Jr.Odis Johnson Jr., PhD, is a Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Education, Director of the NSF Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, and Mixed Methodologies, and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Washington University in St. Louis. He also is a Faculty Scholar at the Institute of Public Health, affiliated faculty at the Brown School, both at Washington University. Prior to his appointments at Washington University, Dr. Johnson chaired the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland. Dr. Johnson completed his doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, and a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Johnson’s civic and intellectual engagements extend from a realization that his own childhood experiences in struggling inner-city neighborhoods and their institutions are shared by far too many people of color. The scholarship that has emerged from this awareness has featured the complicating intersections of residential stratification, the relative status of African Americans, and social policy (educational, housing, or policing policies), not only to expand knowledge, but in hopes of increasing the possibilities of evidenced-based social reform. His work on these topics has earned him a National Academies/Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (the first awarded to an education scholar in the history of the interdisciplinary competition), the 2013 Outstanding Review of Research Award from the American Educational Research Association, and the 2015 Outstanding Author Contribution Award in the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. He currently is the principal investigator of the Fatal Interactions with Police Study (FIPS) which has generated a national data file of police homicides, and three NSF-funded studies that examine how strategies to maintain law and order in neighborhoods and schools impact the representation of race-gender groups within the School-to-Prison and STEM pipelines. |
Dr. Yasser PayneYasser Arafat Payne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice and the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. Dr. Payne completed his doctoral work at the Graduate Center-City University of New York where he was trained as a social-personality psychologist. Also, Dr. Payne completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse
(NIH-NIDA) whereby he worked on a re-entry and intervention-based research project in New York City’s largest jail, Rikers Island. Dr. Payne has organized a street ethnographic research program centered on exploring notions of resilience and resiliency with the streets of Black America using an unconventional methodological framework entitled: Street Participatory Action Research (Street PAR)—the process of doing research and activism with street identified populations. Challenging the dominant arguments in the literature, Dr. Payne asserts that all members of the streets are in fact, resilient. Also, his research program focuses on Black racial identity; street identity; Black masculinity; physical violence; economic and educational opportunity; as well as Gangster Rap music and culture. |