Population Research Discovery Seminars

Co-Sponsor(s):

Population Health Initiative

Public health approaches to violence have shifted from situating policing as a system of care to policing as a system of hurt. Fueled by an ever-growing examination of the multifaceted feedbacks of mass incarceration, the role of criminal legal contact for quality of life has shown to reach further and further into the lives and communities of those who are not in direct contact with the police, the inceptive gatekeepers of criminalization. Drawing on historical data of state-implicated redlining, this study considers the interlocking web of violence between communities and the people designated by the state to protect them. To evaluate the systemic legacy of “surveillance stress” on vulnerable conditions, I connect epidemiological indicators of vulnerable conditions to administrative and legal databases and consider their implication to the role of systemic racism on pandemic inequities.

---

Dr. Alyasah Ali Sewell (they/them/their) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University and Founder and Executive Director of The Race and Policing Project. A widely-published and renowned medical sociologist and social psychologist, they assess the political economy of race, neighborhoods, and health and advance methods for quantifying systemic racism and hyper-marginalization. Their research has garnered support and recognition from the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Baden-Württemberg Foundation, among others. In 2016, Planned Parenthood designated them “The Future: Innovator and Visionary Who Will Transform Black Communities.” They received postdoctoral training in Demography from the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania, their Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Indiana University, and their B.A. summa cum laude in Sociology from the University of Florida with a minor in Women’s Studies.