Rethinking. DC Project
Get to Know the Rethinking DC Team!
Dr. Ebony N. Russ, Ph.D., M.A, M.S: Dr. Russ is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and the Director of the Rethinking DC Youth & Policing Program in the Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service at George Washington University. Additionally, she is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University within the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology focused on Anti-Racism in STEM education. Her research interests include decreasing cardiovascular diseases among criminal justice-involved individuals as well as other marginalized populations, and uplifting the health narratives of oppressed individuals. She is passionate about empowering the next generation of scholar activists.
Dr. Hiromi Ishizawa: After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Professor Ishizawa spent two years as a post-doctoral research associate at the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are in the areas of social and family demography, immigration, sociology of language, and urban sociology. Her research focuses on the understanding of how immigrants integrate into American society. In particular, her work emphasizes the influence of context, such as family and neighborhood, on the process of integration. She has published work that examines many aspects of immigrant integration, including minority language maintenance, civic participation, health, sequence of migration within family units, intermarriage, and residential settlement patterns among minority language speakers. In addition, she conducts research on another immigrant destination country, New Zealand. Her work focuses on residential segregation and patterns of ethnic neighborhoods among recent immigrant groups and the indigenous Maori population. Additionally, her research project examines life satisfaction among immigrants in Japan.
Dr. Amy Cohen: Dr. Cohen brings a wealth of service-learning experience to draw on in her role at GW. Prior to joining Save the Children, she served for nearly a decade as the director for Learn and Serve America at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which is also the parent agency for AmeriCorps and Senior Corps. Her career in academic service and civic engagement began at the University of Pennsylvania, where she helped direct the Penn Program for Public Service (Netter Center for Community Partnerships), an international leader in university-community partnerships.
Dr. Fran Buntman: With academic and career expertises in; inequality, law, power, prisons, punishment, race, resistance, social change, South Africa, Fran Buntman’s primary teaching and research interests focus on prisons and other institutions of punishment and power, especially in the United States and South Africa. A faculty member at the Department of Sociology at George Washington University (GWU) since 2002, she studies resistance and law to understand and change inequities and injustice. These themes are core to her book, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge, 2003) and her recent journal article “Prison and Law, Repression and Resistance: Colonialism and Beyond” (2019). She centers committed teaching and mentoring students along with a pedagogy that integrates theory and practice, including through public engagement and advancing student-led policy change. Dr. Buntman is an institutional leader; she serves as Sociology’s Director of Graduate Studies and directs the interdisciplinary Law and Society Minor which she was instrumental in creating. She has been recognized for her research, teaching, and advising work through multiple awards. Fran Buntman maintains an active research agenda, currently ranging from the manifestos of mass shooters to prisoner reentry. Born in South Africa where anti-apartheid politics and being Jewish shaped her life, she was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand, Brandeis University, and the University of Texas at Austin. She is now happily a 20-year resident of Washington, D.C., a proud mom of DC high school seniors, and grateful for a diaspora of family and friends.
Legacy Continues…
Dr. Bustamante’s Dean’s Seminar: Anti-Racism and Policing
To carry on the legacy of Rethinking D.C., GW Professor Dr. Carlos Bustamante, has launched his first-year Dean’s Seminar, Anti-Racism and Policing under the George Washington University Department of Sociology. This course will introduce first-year students to the historical and contemporary intricacies of America’s carceral systems. Through course readings, class discussions, guest speakers, and assignments we will analyze the historical origins of policing, evaluate diverse sources of empirical research on policing, and combine these contributions to speak to central academic and policy issues related to policing, racism, racial inequality, and racial justice.
Antiracism involves the effort to identify and dismantle various interlocking forms of racism (individual, interpersonal, institutional, structural, etc) through the pursuit of ideas, practices, policies, and political actions. In recent years, the intertwined issues of race and policing have become a central target of antiracists and the source of much debate and contention. This course explores these issues through a survey of topics central to the study of race, policing, and crime control in society.
With Dr. Bustamante setting the foundation of sociological research and analysis for first-year students this fall; he will then focus on the installation of the Anti-Racism and Policing course (Part 2):a community-engaged scholarship segment. This extended section of the course will allow GW students to explore their community outreach and volunteerism skills through the lens of mentorship and service during the Fall of 2023. All first-year students are welcome.
This is only the beginning to implement more spaces within the GW community that invites students, faculty, and community organizers to continue the work that movements have set before us… Stay tuned for more updates and community organizing through the lens of anti-racism work here at GW.
We are just getting started.
Anti-Racism and Policing Team!
Dr. Carlos Bustamante: Carlos Bustamante received his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining George Washington University, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Criminal Justice at State University of New York at Albany. His teaching and research focus on policing, inequality, sociology of race and ethnicity, urban sociology, and qualitative methods. He is broadly interested in the social and racial underpinnings of legality and legitimacy, comparative penality, police culture, and criminal legal reform.
He is currently working on two research projects. The first compares the policing of restricted forms of entertainment in Oakland, California, Stockholm, Sweden, and Lima, Peru. It investigates how city officials and police target local “problems,” and how policed groups respond to and resist different forms of control. His second project researches the emergence of police transparency laws brought about by high-profile incidents of police violence and misconduct. This work considers how these laws contribute to new forms of police accountability, modify policing practices, and realign the key actors and agencies that shape law enforcement.
