Geoff Ward’s scholarship examines racial politics of social control, and the pursuit of racial justice, historically and today.
Ward is professor of African and African-American Studies and faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology and American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship examines the racial politics of social control and the pursuit of racial justice, historically and today. His work appears in numerous academic journals and anthologies, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In addition to numerous research articles and essays, he is the author of The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2012), an award-winning book on the rise, fall and haunting remnants of Jim Crow juvenile justice.
His current projects examine histories of racial violence, their legacies, and implications for repair as well as police culture. Ward is also a founding member of the Reparative Justice Coalition of St. Louis, a community-based organization working to commemorate histories of racist violence, and to address their legacies in our region.
