Courses Taught
Marquette University
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Sex Offenses & Offenders
CRLS 3660
Department of Social & Cultural Sciences
Criminology & Law Studies (CRLS)
Interdisciplinary Minor: Culture, Health & Illness
Sexual Offenses & Offenders is an interdisciplinary course that addresses sexual violence from an intersectional lens, attending to issues of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, class, ability and how identity shapes experiences with social systems and state structures. The course provides students with up-to-date writing and research on sexual violence from academics, activists, artists, and independent scholars. The goal of the course is to integrate the empirical with the experiential, while paying special attention to student's personal and academic development. As part of the Culture, Health, & Illness minor the course also addresses trauma, medicalization, and medico-legal and forensic interventions.
Digital Scholarship Course Project Site
Transformative Justice
CRLS 4300/5300(Undergrad/Graduate)
Department of Social & Cultural Sciences
Criminology & Law Studies (CRLS)
Peace Studies (INPS)
Transformative justice seeks to address violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. It imagines that a more ethical and loving world can emerge from pain. Reponses to crime and violence in North American have historically relied upon violent, colonial-supremacist, carceral regimes. How can we push our thinking beyond these narrow confines of punishment toward the possibility of healing and reconciliation? How have historically oppressed communities responded to violence without relying on carceral systems that produce violence? Students address and practice peacemaking and nonviolence at the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, sexuality, ability, and economics.
Research Methods in Criminology CRLS 3050
Department of Social & Cultural Sciences
Criminology & Law Studies (CRLS)
Social Welfare & Justice (SOWJ)
Sociology (SOCI)
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the ways that social scientists study crime, victimization, institutions, and law. Students explore the empirical tools of the social sciences and the specialized ways of observing, analyzing, and knowing. Students learn the skills necessary for both conducting original research and evaluating research. Students will explore the relationship between theory and method and apply, practice, and critique a variety of research methodologies. Topics covered include the principles, purposes, and limits of social research, formulating and testing hypotheses, data collection techniques, and ethical issues.
Juvenile Delinquency & Justice
CRLS 2100
Department of Social & Cultural Sciences
Criminology & Law Studies (CRLS)
Social Welfare & Justice (SOWJ)
Sociology (SOCI)
This course offers a look at recent trends in juvenile justice, reforms, and policy changes. How should youth be treated when they break the law? How can youth be deterred from crime? How has neuroscience impacted our understanding of brain development, law, and incarceration? Students critically engage with the meaning of delinquency and crime and how they have varied across histories and societies. Students examine concepts such as child/children, childhood, and juvenile and how they intersect with gender, sexuality, race-ethnicity, class and ability. We study the principal sociological explanations for behavior and critically evaluate the meaning of “justice” while examining how definitions of crime intersect with inequalities; how societies attempt to impose social control and how members negotiate its conditions; and how crime and delinquency intersect with various institutions such as the state (police, courts, and corrections), politics, family and schools.
Advanced Qualitative Research Methods, CRLS 4995
Department of Social & Cultural Sciences
Criminology & Law Studies (CRLS)
This course was designed for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students doing research with qualitative research methods in the social sciences. This course is an extension of the research methods course for undergraduates in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences. Students get an advanced overview of research ethics and practice, epistemology and the production and dissemination of knowledge, and methodological and analytical practice in ethnography, interviewing, archival research and cultural/visual method, discourse/narrative analysis, and public/community scholarship and partnerships.
Criminal Behavior & Social Control (University of Minnesota)
Criminal Violence in America (Marquette University)
Department of Sociology
Department of Social & Cultural Sciences
What is crime, who commits crime, and how do we measure it? Through what means and by what justification does society create rules and laws, and punish those who break them? This is a survey course designed to ask and answer these questions from a distinctly sociological perspective; that is, how external conditions contribute to lawful and criminal behavior. Students study the dominant sociological theories of criminal offending and how research plays a key role in our understandings.
Various points of interruption and intervention, such as incarceration are included in discussions of various forms of violence such as predatory crime, violence in the home, sexual assault, and collective violence.
Sociology of Law, SOC 4101
University of Minnesota
Department of Sociology (SOC)
This course considers the relationship between law and society, analyzing law as an expression of cultural values, a reflection of social and political structure, and an instrument of social control and social change. Theories about law and legal institutions are discussed, as well as the legal process and legal actors, focusing on the impact of law, courts, and lawyers on the rights of individuals. Although this course focuses on the US legal system, students explore the relationship between US law and global law and concepts of justice.
Domestic Criminal Violence
SOC 4190
University of Minnesota
Department of Sociology (SOC)
This course provides an overview of the different forms of domestic criminal violence, concentrating primarily on intimate partner violence and child abuse. Students focus on the methodological problems in assessing the nature and extent of these types of violence, the risk factors and correlates of both offending and victimization, and the theoretical explanations that have been offered for these crimes. Students also consider the social and legal responses to intimate partner violence and child abuse. This course will highlight an intersectional understanding of domestic violence by drawing attention to the relevance of multiple social locations such as gender, race, immigration status, and class.
