Throughout my research, I try to address social problems in ways that are respectful and engaging to the communities they impact. I am interested in how researchers can not only deliver policy relevant findings but also construct relationships with researched and affected populations in ways that are mutually productive.
Everyday Peace Indicators
At EPI, we use rigorous research to close the gap between affected communities and the decision makers who create policy and implement projects on their behalf. EPI is a multidimensional methodology rooted in participatory numbers, which tries to turn hard-to-measure concepts like peace, justice and coexistence into measurable indicators that make sense for people in their daily lived experience.
➤ Partners we support
➤ What is everyday peace?
In this talk, I present my work with colleagues from Everyday Peace Indicators and the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab on “everyday peace” in rural Colombia and urban America. The full clip is available from the Middlebury College Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation.
Salzburg Global Seminar
In 2020, I began to work with the Salzburg Global Seminar through the multiyear series, Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice. This program regularly convenes scholars, practitioners and activists from around the world to share lessons and chart strategies for public safety and criminal justice reform.
➤ Public outputs
Report: Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice
Webinar: Data-Driven Criminal Justice Reform
Report & Video: What’s Measured, Matters
Read the Salzburg Statement on achieving a Whole System Approach to Youth Violence Reduction
What's Measured, Matters: Better Data for a Better Criminal Justice System
Everyday Indicators for Policy Innovation
For my work in California with Possibility Lab and Santa Clara University, we have partnered with several community-based organizations and agencies to make our data and findings as relevant as possible for decision makers and communities alike.
➤ Project sites
➤ partners we support
How would we measure “safety” if it was defined by communities themselves?
Produced by the Possibility Lab with indicators of community safety and wellbeing drawn from our work with six community-based organizations around Oakland.
Reparations in the United States
I support some of the networks of scholars, practitioners and activists who are currently pushing the US to confront its history of slavery. My blog post in The Washington Post on the importance of distinguishing reparations from traditional social policy was cited in congressional testimony by Human Rights Watch to support the establishment of a federal commission on reparations (HR 40).
Civil Rights Corps
Together with Civil Rights Corps, I am helping convene a group of expert practitioners and scholars around the theme of alternative safety metrics to chart the state of the field and strategize around how to to give the full breadth of relevant safety metrics the legitimacy they deserve.
Red Hook Community Justice Center
In partnership with Dr. Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg at UC Berkeley School of Law and Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law, I am designing a project to support the Red Hook Community Justice Center and its partner, the Center for Court Innovation with research on alternative success metrics for restorative justice. Typically, the succes of criminal justice institutions is measured according to crime statistics: does crime go down? Do defendants stay out of jail? But these only tell one part of the story. We will speak with a broad cross-section of stakeholders, from prosecutors to community members, to ask what else matters for justice beyond crime.
Banner Photo: Salzburg Global Seminar, Salzburg, Austria