Towards Just Futures

The final event of the 2024–25 (In)Justice Series on Just Policing revisits the core concern of this project: What might it take to create just policing? 

In the city where George Floyd was murdered and where activists have fought to “end” the Minneapolis Police Department, where does the movement go from here? What can scholarship, activism, and community engagement do to move toward a more just future? Moderated by Michelle Phelps, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, with special guests to be announced.

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.

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