Mark Warren, Professor in the Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs, University of Massachusetts Boston
Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Speaker, Panel Discussion, & Book Signing
Mark Warren will discuss how Black and Brown parents and young people have challenged zero tolerance and racially discriminatory discipline practices and policing policies that push students of color out of schools and into the criminal justice system. He will highlight the strategies they have used to organize locally to change policies that criminalize children and build alliances with allies to create a national movement that has begun to reduce exclusionary discipline, defund and remove police from schools, and pursue visions of education for liberation.
Mark will be joined by a panel of high school students from the Providence Alliance for Student Safety (PASS) coalition, who are organizing to remove police from their schools, end the criminalization of students of color, and implement alternatives like transformative/restorative justice to create educational environments that are safe, supportive, and empowering to low-income students of color.
Mark R. Warren is professor of public policy and public affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a sociologist and community engaged scholar who studies and works with community, parent and youth organizing groups seeking to promote equity and justice in education, community development, and American democratic life. Warren is the author of six books, most recently Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Mark has co-founded several networks promoting activist scholarship, community organizing and education justice, including the People’s Think Tank on Educational Justice, Urban Research Based Action Network, and the Special Interest Group on Community and Youth Organizing in the American Educational Research Association. He has won a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. He is married to Roberta Udoh, a Boston Public Schools teacher, and together they have raised two beautiful daughters. Visit Mark’s website here.