Biography: Julisa is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Riverside. Her research and teaching interests include: gender, race/ethnicity, and class inequalities; social policy; sociology of health and health care; medical sociology; reproductive health and politics; political sociology; Chicanx/Latinx studies; social movements; and qualitative and quantitative methods. Her dissertation uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the politics and impacts of state-level funding restrictions to publicly funded family planning programs, which provide reproductive health care to low-income women. Julisa’s research received funding from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (2014) and the University of California Consortium on Social Science and Law Fellowship (2017). It appears in The Oxford Handbook on Women’s Social Movement Activism (2017), The Handbook on Gender and Social Policy (2018), and Research in Political Sociology (2020).

Contact Info: julisa.mccoy@email.ucr.edu

Biography: Sarah is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology department. Her current research interests focus on gender, workplace inequality, and police organizations. Sarah’s dissertation, entitled “Intersectional Inequality Among Women Within Police Agencies” uses interviews to explore women police officer’s experiences of workplace inequality in two locations within the United States. Her master’s thesis covered similar concepts in a Canadian context. She has received the UC Consortium of Social Science and Law Summer Fellowship as well as the Presley Center of Crime and Justice Studies Graduate Student Research Fellowship to support her work. Her recent article “Seeing and Doing Gender at Work: A Qualitative Analysis of Canadian Male and Female Police Officers” published in Feminist Criminology is now available online.

Her teaching interests include research methods, crime and criminology, and the sociology of women. Sarah is also a member of several professional associations including the American Society of Criminology, the American Sociological Association, the Canadian Sociological Association, and Sociologists for Women in Society. She is most active in the Division on Women and Crime (within ASC), where she is currently the Graduate Executive Counselor.

Sarah received her B.A. (with Honors) in Sociology and Drama from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 2014 and her M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Riverside in 2016.

Contact Info: sarah.bannister@email.ucr.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Roberto Rivera is a Ph.D. Candidate from the University of California, Riverside. He is researching racialized governmental structures as it intersects the variables of trust in communities of color. He is additionally interested in the advancement of Restorative Justice practices through his “Holistic policing methods”.

Roberto is the 2018-2019 U.S. Fulbright Scholar award recipient in Criminology for Jamaica (See article below) and a 2020 Golden Key International Honor’s Society Scholar. He has presented in 5 countries and is currently working on a book that profiles his experiences in Jamaica as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar (2023) and the 2nd book on his Ph.D. dissertation (2023).

Roberto’s critical criminological scholarship is unique as it comes from his work as a police officer of 20 years. In 2008, as an officer, he national presented and was recognized at the U.S. Department of Justice CCDO annual conference in Detroit Michigan for his Adelante Project initiative. Furthermore, his M.A. thesis has been picked up by Routledge Taylor and Francis as a chapter in Gringo Injustice, edited by his Ph.D. chair, Alfredo Mirande. He is profiled by the American Bar Association and Esquire Kim Wright in Lawyers as Changemakers: The Global Integrative Law Movement; Bobby’s Story (2016) as making “positive contributions in policing”. He was one of two non-attorneys that was nationally profiled.

Additionally, due to Roberto’s interest in the Sociology of Disasters and the impacts of Climate Change, he has served in numerous high-level disaster relief efforts. As a volunteer he has responded to disasters in the U.S. and in the Caribbean, including Hurricane Maria (2017); Hurricane Harvey (2017); Hurricane Florence (2018); Camp Fire in Paradise California (2018); Puerto Rico Earthquakes (2020); Colorado Wildfire (2020); recent wildfires in Northern California (2020 & 2021), and many more other disasters. In his free time, he is developing a nonprofit, Earth at Peace, whose aim is education on Climate Change, the tipping point, and planting trees globally through a global network of educators, university students, and key community stakeholders.

He is available for public speaking and his Curriculum Vitae (CV) is available upon request.

https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2018/11/01/former-cop-wants-build-trust-between-communities-and-police

Areas of Specialization: Critical Race Theory, Race & Inequality, Restorative Justice Practice, Socio-Legal Studies, Qualitative Research, Ethnography, Sociology of Disasters, Crime & Climate Change, and Indigenous Cultures.

Contact information: rrive011@ucr.edu