Emerson Collective Names CCJS Assistant Professor Robert Stewart a New Fellow
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice (CCJS) Assistant Professor Robert Stewart was named a fellow of the Emerson Collective, a social change organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Stewart is one of only 17 fellows to be nominated by an Emerson Collective network member and selected to participate in the organization’s Democracy Cohort, which was created “to strengthen our democratic systems, protect the right to vote, and foster civic engagement.”
“The Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice is excited that Professor Robert Stewart was selected for the prestigious Emerson Collective Fellowship, which affords him the opportunity to dive deeply into a unique and rarely researched population, those who have been subject to the control of the American criminal legal system” said Sally Simpson, a Distinguished University Professor and interim chair of CCJS. “His research will produce unique data that will increase knowledge about their lived experiences, values, and opinions after disenfranchisement and, hopefully, add multidimensionality to how we as a society perceive and characterize the population.”
Having demonstrated “an established track record of excellence and originality; a deep engagement in education, immigration, social justice, the environment, and health; and the potential to pursue vital new work with the support of a fellowship,” Stewart and his co-fellows will receive one year of financial support for their pertinent research projects. Stewart’s project aims to produce what may be the first nationally representative sample of currently and formerly disenfranchised people’s opinions on politics, ideology, and more.
“We know a lot about these people’s experiences in the criminal legal system, but not much about them as people; as human beings with beliefs and viewpoints,” explained Stewart, who has served as the founding Director of Research for a non-profit, the Minnesota Justice Research Center, working to improve the justice system through high-quality and accessible research, policy development, and education. “Being acknowledged with this fellowship for research that focuses on the perspective, beliefs and experiences of this population—beyond their criminal legal experience—validates the importance of these questions, not just for me and a narrow academic research interest, but for broader questions about inclusion, democracy and social membership.”
Stewart and the other Democracy Cohort fellows will also receive assistance in bringing their findings forward for the rest of the world to access and use by way of the Collective's large, diverse network of artists, journalists, writers, documentary filmmakers, academics, and social justice organizations located throughout the country and world.
“With such a large group—more than 5 million Americans are disenfranchised–—we have this tendency to be reductionist, to reduce people to this one marker, their criminal record, and not think about how this population can be complex and diverse in all the different connotations of the word; race, gender identity, class, ideology, religion, etc.,” said Stewart, who is also a member of a multistate research team studying criminal legal financial obligations, plus co-principal investigator on a study of online criminal record data accuracy. “The thing I’m looking forward to most, with the help of this fellowship, is getting this data out to the world and making it easier for researchers, scholars, nonprofits, advocacy people and policymakers anywhere to answer the questions that they have about this population.”
For more information about Stewart and his latest research project, see here.
Published on Tue, Feb 1, 2022 - 12:22PM