Just Policing: Transnational Perspectives on the Definition and Possibility of Justice in Law Enforcement
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and slated for the 2024–2025 academic year, this Sawyer Seminar will explore the histories of (in)justice in policing across the Americas, Africa, and Europe and contemporary efforts to reform, transform, or abolish policing. The goal of the seminar is to ask: Can policing ever be “just”?
Throughout the seminar, leading scholars and community activists will give weekly public talks and serve as a springboard for participants to collectively think about policing and its future. In Fall 2024, we will turn our gaze to the past, using examples across the Atlantic world to understand the diverse roots of the police. Then, in Spring 2025, we will examine current case studies and proposed solutions to the problems of policing. Across both terms, the seminar is thus structured to help us answer the question: Can we imagine a form of law enforcement outside the histories of class conflict, enslavement, and imperialism?
The Sawyer Seminar will run a seminar for graduate students (HIST8960) throughout the year and will also partner with the Institute for Advanced Study on the 2024–25 University of Minnesota (In)Justice Series on Just Policing, a series of events open to the university community and general public. Learn more about the Sawyer Seminar in this recent feature in Minnesota Law.
Project Leads
William P. Jones: Professor, Department of History, University of Minnesota
William P. Jones is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His research centers on race and labor in the United States, and he is author, most recently, of Police Collective Bargaining and Police Violence: A Policy Report, a joint project of Community Change and the Center for Labor and a Just Economy Labor at Harvard Law School (2023).
Yalile Suriel: Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Minnesota
Yalile Suriel is an assistant professor of universities and power in the History Department at the University of Minnesota. Her work examines how the United States carceral apparatus intersects with higher education.
Susanna L. Blumenthal: William L. Prosser Professor of Law and Professor of History, University of Minnesota
Susanna L. Blumenthal is the William L. Prosser Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press 2016). Her current research examines law’s role in policing the borderland between capitalism and crime. Longer term projects center on violence and its regulation in carceral institutions in United States history.
Michelle S. Phelps: Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota
Michelle S. Phelps is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research is in the sociology of punishment, focusing in particular on the punitive turn in the United States through the lenses of policing, probation, and prisons. She is the co-author of Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (Oxford 2017) and the author of The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America (Princeton 2024).
Sarah Balakrishnan: Assistant Professor, Department of History, Duke University
Sarah Balakrishnan is an Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. Her work studies the imperial encounter in southern Ghana through changes to space, capital and the political imagination. Her publications have featured several studies on indigenous prisons in precolonial Ghana, published in journals including The Journal of African History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Punishment & Society.
Patrick McNamara: Associate Professor of History, University of Minnesota
Patrick McNamara is Associate Professor of Latin American History and affiliated faculty member with the Human Rights Program. His current research focuses on gang violence in El Salvador and cartel violence in Mexico. His research also examines police and military efforts to combat that violence. Much of this research contributes to his work as a country conditions expert for asylum applicants.