Racial Justice

Assistant Professor Fayola Jacobs was awarded a Social Justice Impact Grant from the University of Minnesota for her project, “Culturally appropriate emergency preparedness and response training in North Minneapolis.”

Professor Joe Soss is co-author of a new book, "Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice," published by the University of Chicago Press.

Associate Professor Kathy Quick published the article, "(De)Centering whiteness through community dialogues about safety problems and solutions," in the journal, Public Administration Review.

Associate Professor Gabe Chan and postdoctoral researcher Bhavin Pradhan published a paper, "Racial and Economic Disparities in Electric Reliability and Service Quality in Xcel Energy’s Minnesota Service Area," which asks whether disparities exist in access to shared infrastructure systems, focusing on the electric system, an essential service delivered by heavily regulated public utilities.

Associate Professor Bonnie Keeler is a co-author of a new study, "The impacts of racially discriminatory housing policies on the distribution of intra-urban heat and tree canopy: A comparison of racial covenants and redlining in Minneapolis, MN," published recently in Landscape and Urban Planning.

Professor Samuel Myers Jr. has been named the inaugural Rebecca Blank Fellow by the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (AAPSS). The AAPSS recognizes the contributions he has made to the advancement of social science and to public understanding of the human condition.

Doctoral candidate Shuyi Deng has received the 2022 ARNOVA Best Conference Paper Award for "The Cost of Color? Race-conscious Mission Statements and Nonprofit Funding," which examines the topic of racial disparities in the nonprofit sector.

Professor Samuel Myers Jr. has been awarded a two-year, $417,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study racial disparities in drowning deaths. While conventional explanations for these disparities focus on individual behaviors and characteristics,  Myers and the project team hypothesize that structural factors such as systemic racial discrimination play outsized roles in explaining the racial disparities.

New research by Assistant Professor Heather Randell concludes that dam constructions in the US have significantly contributed to land loss of Native people. Dams have flooded more than 1.13 million acres of tribal land in the US, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

An article co-authored by Associate Professor Tia Sherèe Gaynor, “Coming to Terms: Teaching Systemic Racism and (the Myth of) White Supremacy,” has been selected as the Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE) 2023 Outstanding Article.