People
Precious Bedell
Precious works as a human subjects research coordinator in the Department of Psychiatry, and is a doctoral candidate at the Warner School of Education. She is a specialist in providing resources to and helping those reentering from prisons and jails on how to navigate complex medical, social and reentry services.
precious_bedell@urmc.rochester.edu
Joel Burges
Joel is an associate professor in the Department of English and director of the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. He is the author of Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture and a co-editor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. He is at work on a second book entitled Literature after TV. He is also researching the cultural history of the carceral state, including in upstate New York. He is particularly interested in the role of data and data visualization in the politics of mass incarceration. He will be teaching in Five Points Correctional Facility in fall 2019.
Kristin Doughty
Kristin is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is the author of Remediation in Rwanda: Grassroots Legal Forums, which examines how people experience post- genocide law and reconciliation, based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Rwanda. She has taught at Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, New York (2018) and Albion Correctional Facility in Albion, New York (2019) as part of the Rochester Prison Education Project.
Joshua Dubler
Joshua is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion and Classics. He is author of Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison, an ethnographic study of the chapel at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. A 2016 Carnegie Fellow, he is currently completing a book manuscript, co-authored with philosopher Vincent Lloyd, titled Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons. He is the founder and director of the Rochester Prison Education Project, which offers college courses in nearby prisons and helps to educate Rochester students about the crisis of mass incarceration. He has taught courses at Graterford Prison and at Auburn Prison.
Kara Finnigan
Kara is professor of education policy at the Warner School of Education where she also directs the educational policy programs. She has conducted research and evaluations of K-12 policies and programs at the local, state, and federal level for more than twenty five years. Her research focuses on issues of race and equity; blends perspectives in education, political science, and sociology; employs qualitative and quantitative methods, including social network analysis and GIS mapping; and focuses on urban contexts. Her work focuses on accountability policies and choice policies, as well as the interconnections between education policy and other policy areas including housing and criminal justice. She recently co-authored a policy brief, Law and Order in School and Society: How Discipline and Policing Policies Harm Students of Color, and What We Can Do About It and co-authored a book, Striving in Common: A Regional Equity Framework for Urban Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2018).
kfinnigan@warner.rochester.edu
Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge
Evelyne is a lens based media artist and associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History. She has collaborated with incarcerated artists and writers serving life sentences in correctional facilities across the country for the creation of the book Wall+Paper, published by Publication Studio Hudson. The project was awarded a Project Grant to Visual Artists from the Canada Council for the Arts and was presented in various multimedia exhibitions. In 2017, Leblanc-Roberge was invited by Camac Art Center (Marnay-sur-Seine, France) to collaborate with a group of incarcerated individuals at the Villenauxe-La-Grande Detention Center (Champagne-Ardenne, France). The resulting project, Les Portes, consists of a series of photographic fictional doorways installed permanently in some of the common spaces of the detention center.
evelyne.leblanc-roberge@rochester.edu
Diane Morse
Diane is in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine at the School of Medicine and Dentistry. She is the author of several peer-reviewed journal articles including: “Does A Primary Health Clinic for Formerly Incarcerated Women Increase Linkage To Care?,” “Finding the Loopholes: a Cross-sectional Qualitative Study of Systemic Barriers to Treatment Access for Women Drug Court Participants,” and “Meeting Health and Psychological Needs of Women in Drug Treatment Court.” Her work examines the barriers and facilitators for justice-involved women (including Drug Treatment Court, probation, and re-entering from incarceration) for physical and mental healthcare and social services access as a means of addressing the totality of their needs to prevent reincarceration and attain health.
diane_morse@urmc.rochester.edu
Dena Swanson
Dena is an educational and developmental psychologist in Counseling and Human Development. She is the author of Psychosocial Development: Identity, Stress and Competence and editor of Adolescence: Development in a Global Era. She is the Human Development program director and teaches graduate courses including “Minority Youth Development in Urban Contexts”; “Advocacy, Consulting, and Systems Change”; and “School, Family and Community Relations.” She serves on the editorial board for Child Development and is involved with the Multi-city Urban Resilience Research Initiative through the University of Chicago. She continues a longstanding collaborative relationship with the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence toward mitigating the school-to-prison pipeline.