Please join us on May 14 for a "Matrix on Point" panel discussion on racial justice in America. The panelists will discuss the critical momentum of Black-led protests and the Black Lives Matter movement this past year, and situate this within the larger historical context of social movements for racial justice in the United States and the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement. 

This event is presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

Panelists

Leigh Raiford is an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about race, gender, justice and visuality, and serves as inaugural director of The Black Studies Collaboratory, an initiative to amplify the world-building work of Black Studies funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Just Futures grant. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle; co-editor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora; and co-editor with Renee Romano of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory. She is currently working on a book entitled, When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World.

Brandon M. Terry is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University. He earned a PhD with university distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, where he was also a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and a recipient of the Sterling Prize, in 2012. Prior to Yale, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with an AB in Government and African and African American Studies and received an MSc in Political Theory Research as a Michael von Clemm Fellow at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford.

Monica Bell is an Associate Professor of Law & Sociology at Yale Law School. Monica's research focuses on policing and the criminal legal system, welfare and public benefits law, housing law, and race and the law. Monica's scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, American Journal of Sociology, NYU Law Review, Law & Society Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and other journals. She has also published writing in popular outlets. Before joining the faculty at Yale, Monica was a Climenko Fellow & Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She has also served on the staff of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and multiple political campaigns.

Christopher Muller (moderator) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He studies the political economy of incarceration in the United States from Reconstruction to the present, with a particular focus on how agricultural labor markets, migration, and struggles over land and labor have affected racial and class inequality in incarceration. He has also written on the causes and effects of environmental inequality and inequality in death from infectious disease.

Photo by James Eades on Unsplash