Phillip Atiba Goff is the inaugural Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the co-founder and president of Center for Policing Equity, and an expert in contemporary forms of racial bias and discrimination, as well as the intersections of race and gender. Dr. Goff serves as one of four Principal Investigators for CPE’s National Justice Database, the first national database on racial disparities in police stops and use of force.
More recently, Dr. Goff led the CPE in becoming one of three Principal Investigators for the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, which will contribute information to the National Justice Database. Dr. Goff conducts work exploring the ways in which racial prejudice is not a necessary precondition for racialdiscrimination. That is, despite the normative view of racial discrimination—that it stems from prejudiced explicit or implicit attitudes—his research demonstrates that situational factors facilitate racially unequal outcomes.
Dr. Goff’s model of evidence-based approaches to justice has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Department of Justice, Russell Sage Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Open Society Institute-Baltimore, Atlantic Philanthropies, William T. Grant Foundation, the COPS Office, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the NAACP LDF, NIMH, SPSSI, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and Google.org among others. Dr. Goff was a witness for the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and has presented before Members of Congress and Congressional Panels, Senate Press Briefings, and White House Advisory Councils.
Ruha Benjamin is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. She is also the founder of the JUST DATA Lab and the author of two books, People’s Science (Stanford) and Race After Technology (Polity), and editor of Captivating Technology (Duke). She writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.
Cosponsored by Hopkins Population Center and Department of Sociology
“Filter Bubbles, Identity, and Culture: Three Field Experiments on Social Media”
Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke and the director of the Polarization Lab. His research examines political polarization, culture and social psychology using tools from the field of computational social science (e.g. digital trace data from social media sites, automated text analysis, and machine learning)
Chris is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Carnegie Fellowship, and numerous awards from scholarly associations. His work has been published by The New York Times, Princeton University Press, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Sociological Review, and other leading publications. Funding for his work has been provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. His research has also been covered by major media outlets such as the New York Times, NBC News, National Public Radio, the Washington Post, and the BBC.
Chris is the Editor of the Oxford University Press Series in Computational Social Science and the co-founder of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, which are free training events designed to introduce junior scholars to the field that are held concurrently in seven universities around the world each year. Chris also serves on the Advisory Council to the National Science Foundation’s Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, and helped create Duke’s Interdisciplinary Data Science Program.
Dr. Andrew Perrin is a professor of sociology and has been a member of the Carolina faculty since 2001. An accomplished and interdisciplinary scholar, he has conducted research on the cultural sociology of democracy, health messages in children’s movies and translations of postwar Frankfurt School theory, among other work.
As a professor of sociology specializing in research on the value of humanities scholarship and education for democratic citizenship, he brings a unique set of skills to support arts and humanities faculty across a spectrum of departments in the College of Arts & Sciences. Perrin was a faculty fellow in 2007 and 2016 and completed the Academic Leadership Program in 2010. He was a member of the IAH Faculty Advisory Board, the IAH external review committee, the Weil Lecture Selection Committee and the Johnston Prize Selection Committee.
From 2016-2019, Perrin chaired the committee overseeing the General Education Curriculum revision, which resulted in the IDEAs in Action curriculum. In addition, he has served as director of the Carolina Seminars since 2014, increasing both the number and scope of these interdisciplinary seminars, and he revived the Douglass Hunt lecture series. He has served on Faculty Council, the Educational Policy Committee and the Faculty Athletics Committee, among other duties in service to Carolina.
To view Perrin’s sociology website, please click the link here.
Max Besbris is An Assistant Professor at Rice University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University in 2017. Before starting graduate school, he worked at UCSF and Google and received B.A.s in Sociology and Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley.
His research examines how individuals make decisions in organizations and economic markets, how these decisions are influenced by interaction with others, and how these decisions reproduce existing demographic and geographic inequalities. His book, Market Makers (under contract with the University of Chicago Press) investigates how people choose where to live and how much to spend in the housing market. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork analyzing interactions between real estate agents and prospective homebuyers, Market Makers presents an in-depth account of the social influences that come together during the sales process. The book offers a new perspective on markets, revealing how intermediaries like real estate agents set the terms for our most important economic decisions.
Max’s work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.