Meet the Organizers

Nuriam Abam is a fourth-year Legal Studies student at Ontario Tech University. Her current advocacy is focused on creating a dedicated safe space for racialized students, where communities who historically have been disempowered by colonialism and white supremacist ideologies can come together for progressive conversations and collective community building.

Jordan Anderson is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research focuses on risk and dangerousness in modern society, with particular attention to post-sentence regulation of sex offenders in New Zealand. She is also the Chair of JustSpeak, a movement for transformational change of criminal justice toward a fair, just, and flourishing Aotearoa.

Marina Bell is an abolitionist activist and PhD candidate in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. Her academic work uses abolition as a theoretical and strategic lens for critiquing mainstream criminal punishment reforms and building alternative solutions. She also aims to confront major challenges, critiques, and tensions within the abolitionist perspective—a project directly inspired by her work with local social justice organizations. She is a co-founding member of Transforming Justice Orange County, an organization that works to address carceral state injustices at the local level and build an abolitionist front in Orange County, and she works regularly with TJOC and other social justice organizations to mobilize community, engage in public education, agitate, and base-build.

Michael J. Coyle, PhD is Professor, Department of Political Science and “Criminal” Justice, California State University, Chico. He is editor of various books on penal abolitionism as well as the Studies in Penal Abolition and Transformative Justice Routledge book series, and the author of Talking Criminal Justice: Language and the Just Society (Routledge 2013) and the forthcoming Seeing Crime: Penal Abolition as the End of Utopian Criminal Justice (University of California Press). Michael teaches courses on penal abolition, restorative justice, ethics and justice, and an ever growing list of special topics that highlight the social construction of discarded persons (e.g. the excluded, imprisoned, homeless, targeted “deviant”) as “unlike us,” “dangerous,” or “punishment-worthy.” His activism – on campus, in Chico, and in national & international community contexts – has centered on leading or participating in groups engaging penal abolition, racial and other social-identity based supremacies, the war on the poor, and a continuously shifting array of justice topics as they emerge (“criminal justice” system abuses, community justice projects, indigenous rights, governing abuses, and more).

Gabby Medina Falzone is a mixed race, system-impacted educator, researcher, and community activist committed to challenging the psychosocial effects of the carceral state. Her academic research looks at the ways policing and criminalization psychologically harm adolescents and her community activism focuses on developing community-led alternatives to policing in addressing mental health crises. She received her PhD in Social and Cultural Studies of Education at UC Berkeley and Is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at Penn State University.

Dr. Luis A. Fernández is a Professor in, and chair of, the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. He served as the President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2017-2018 and is currently the co-editor of Critical Issues in Crime and Society, Rutgers University Press. He has worked in various community-based efforts related to immigration and policing. He is the author and editor of several books, including Policing Dissent and Alternatives to Policing. His most recent research focuses on police defunding and abolitionist practice.

Laura Mishne Heller is a doctoral student in the Department of Criminal Justice and serves as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Social Work at the University of North Dakota. With a background in case management and medical social work, her current academic research focuses on health literacy among (currently) incarcerated individuals. She recently had the opportunity to participate in a street participatory action research (street PAR) team, which was formed at a men’s prison in Ohio, focused on the significant barriers impacting the low rates of release decisions by the parole board. Her research interests include epidemiological criminology, health policy, community research and development, penal abolition, street PAR, and experiential learning, community engagement, and service-learning in higher education.

Dr. Sandra Joy is a Professor in the Sociology Department at Rowan University, located in Glassboro, New Jersey. She has been on the faculty at Rowan since 2002, teaching courses such as Race & Crime, Race & Social Change, and The Sociology of Death, Dying, & Bereavement. In 2002, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University and in 1990 she received her M.S.W. from Norfolk State University. Dr. Joy is also a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a dozen years of experience as a mental health and substance abuse therapist. For more than two decades, whether Dr. Joy was working in the mental health field or within academia, she has maintained her work as a community activist. She has been an abolitionist in the anti-death penalty movement throughout this time and served on the Board of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) for many years. Currently, she serves on the Board of the Kalief Browder Foundation and is an Advisory Board member for the Petey Greene Program. Dr. Joy is the author of Coalition Building in the Anti-Death Penalty Movement: Privileged Morality, Race Realities (2010) and Grief, Loss, & Treatment for Death Row Families: Forgotten No More (2014).

Shailesh Kumar is a commonwealth scholar funded by the UK government and a PhD candidate at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London. His current research project is an empirical study of the operation of legal reforms in the area of sexual violence against children in India. He is a member of the Birkbeck branch of the University and College Union. He had been involved in grassroots work in India in the states of Bihar and Rajasthan. His works are informed by an anti-caste abolitionist feminist perspective. He has published articles, among other journals, in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Semiotique juridique and Contexto Internacional, and chapters in The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition and The Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment.

Jen Rinaldi is an Associate Professor in Legal Studies at Ontario Tech University. Her research takes up how non-normative bodies are read, marked, and produced in and through socio-legal discourse. She is a dedicated member of Recounting Huronia, a research collective that documents the history of the Huronia Regional Centre (a Canadian institution that housed persons with intellectual disability diagnoses) from the perspective of its survivors. In service to this collective she co-wrote Institutional Violence and Disability: Punishing Conditions (Routledge, 2019); and founded the Huronia Survivors Speakers Bureau, which enabled intellectually disabled institutional survivors to tell their stories to audiences across Canada. Currently, Rinaldi is focused on research and activism related to deinstitutionalization, prison and police abolition, and migrant justice.

Amy L. Shuster is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Denison University. Their research aims to connect themes in ancient philosophy to contemporary political concerns. For instance, beginning from the ancient wisdom that "nothing forced stays in the soul" Amy has argued for a theory of anti-violence that critiques the state's use of force and so-called just war theory more broadly. Their work has been published in History of Political Thought, Polis: A Journal of Greek Political Thought, PS: Political Science and Politics, and SPECTRA. They were the co-editor of the Global Directory of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution Programs (Sixth and Seventh Editions). In 2015, Amy completed the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program instructor training and subsequently taught a course on the philosophy of happiness at a local prison. They engage in activism because it is a source of life amidst the deadly force of racism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, capitalism, and authoritarianism; and participate in this gathering from a novice's desire to become a more effective agent of abolition.