Annual John Ll. J. Edwards Memorial Lecture
Join us for the 27th annual Edwards Lecture, "The Least: Violence, the Vulnerable, and the Promise of Black Freedom for a New World," featuring Reuben Jonathan Miller, Associate Professor, Crown Family School and the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, University of Chicago.
Rather than mitigate risk, our approach to violence and our efforts to separate ourselves from people who’ve caused harm, through policing and incarceration and myriad forms of political, social and economic exclusion, has hastened, and in fact ensured, a more violent future. We see this across the globe, from the million-dollar blocks and the gang, violent crime and sex offense registries of the United States, to the fervor over knife crimes, joint enterprise crimes and “modern slavery” in England and Wales. Exclusion is a kind of violence that has the unfortunate effect of producing more violence in its wake. The least, those most vulnerable, who are most often managed through the violence of disregard, offer a way out. We begin by examining how and why the needs of the racialized poor are so often misrecognized as threat, look to the work people we’ve learned to be afraid of find and make dynamic lives anew, in the midst of violence of many kinds, and end with a call to reimagine public safety and the role of government in our lives.
The lecture will be presented in person, starting at 4:00 pm and will be followed by Q&A and a reception.
This event is presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and cosponsored by U of T's Woodsworth College and Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law.
About the John Ll. J. Edwards Memorial Lecture:
The annual John Ll. J. Edwards Memorial Lecture honours and celebrates the late John Llewellyn Jones Edwards, professor at the Faculty of Law and founder of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. Edwards was an English-trained legal scholar who taught at Dalhousie University before joining U of T Law. In 1963, he established the Centre for Criminology as a world-renowned multidisciplinary research centre which has grown to offer undergraduate, master's and PhD programs in criminology and sociolegal studies.
Reuben Jonathan Miller
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His research, which focuses on race, punishment, and social welfare policy, is published in journals across the social sciences. In 2021, Miller published his first sole authored book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, which won a number of awards, including the 2023 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology, the 2022 Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association and two PROSE Awards from the Association of American Publisher’s, including the award for Excellence in Social Science. Halfway Home was also a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize for Current Affairs and the Pen America John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction. In 2022, Miller was selected as a MacArthur Fellow, the so called “genius award”, with the prize committee noting that "Miller is modeling a way to write about his subjects that refuses to reduce them to their hardships, and he is illuminating how the American carceral system reshapes individuals' lives and relationships long after their time has been served.” He is currently conducting a transnational study of black emancipation in port cities along the transatlantic slave trade route and a study of violence and our responses to it.