Toward Just Futures

In the final event of the 2024–25 (In)Justice Series on Just Policing, we come back to the core concern of our project: What might it take to create just policing? 

Panelists Monica C. Bell (Yale University) and Leesa Kelly (Memorialize the Movement), moderated by Michelle S. Phelps (University of Minnesota Twin Cities) will discuss how scholarship, activism, and community engagement can move us toward a more just future. Through her project Fifty Mothers, Bell transforms interviews into poetry to illuminate how Black American women living on the margins love, fear, hope, dream, ache, wonder, resist, grieve, claim their dignity, and remake their lives. At Memorialize the Movement, Kelly and her collaborators have developed a living archive that collects, preserves, and activates the plywood protest murals created during the Minneapolis uprising in 2020 to ensure the voices and experiences of the community who created them are not forgotten or erased. Together, our panelists will discuss how art ranging from poetry to street art created during protest against radicalized police violence can illuminate our path toward justice.

Image: A child raises a fist at a concert at George Floyd Square on May 25, 2021, a year after George Floyd was murdered. Credit Lorie Shaull via Flickr.

The 2024-25 (In)Justice Series on Just Policing presented by the Institute for Advanced Study at the UMN critically examines how policing intersects with broader societal issues across the globe and explores efforts to reform, transform, or abolish policing. Presented in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing.

Panelists:

Monica C. Bell is Professor of Law & Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. She uses sociological theory and methods to explore a wide variety of legal questions, mostly those focused on race and class inequality. Some subject matters that Bell has focused on include policing, structural and interpersonal violence, safety and security, welfare and public benefits, and housing and residential segregation. 

Leesa Kelly is an activist, writer, public speaker, and curator. Kelly is the founder and executive director of Memorialize the Movement (MTM), a living archive located in Minneapolis dedicated to the preservation and activation of over 1,000 plywood murals that emerged following George Floyd’s murder and the Minneapolis uprising in 2020. Through her work with MTM, Kelly has spoken at over 20 conferences and universities, organized 10 large-scale exhibitions in the Twin Cities and New York, published a catalog of the murals titled Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising, and has led workshops on cultivating BIPOC representation and visibility in the museum and conservation industry. She believes in dismantling oppressive systems and rebuilding new systems that work for ALL people.

About the Moderator

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).

Related Links

• The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America by Michelle S. Phelps
• Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice by Michelle S. Phelps and others
• Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing: Transnational Perspectives on the Definition and Possibility of Justice in Law Enforcement 
• IAS Institute for Advanced Study