Southeastern to present Social Justice Speaker
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
by: Tonya Lowentritt 
SOCIAL JUSTICE SPEAKER - Southeastern Louisiana University’s Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice presents the return of the 16th annual Social Justice Speaker Series featuring a discussion with Derecka Purnell, a human rights lawyer, researcher, and author of “Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom.” Scheduled Nov. 2 at 2 p.m., the free event will take place in Pottle Auditorium.
HAMMOND – Southeastern Louisiana University’s Department of Sociology and Criminal
Justice presents the return of the 16th annual Social Justice Speaker Series featuring
a discussion with Derecka Purnell, a human rights lawyer, researcher, and author of
“Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom.” Scheduled
Nov. 2 at 2 p.m., the free event will take place in Pottle Auditorium.
Purnell works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance,
research, and training in community-based organizations through an abolitionist framework.
As a Skadden Fellow, she helped build the Justice Project at Advancement Project’s
National Office, which focused on consent decrees, police and prosecutor accountability,
and jail closures. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Purnell co-created the
COVID19 Policing Project at the Community Resource Hub for Safety Accountability.
The project tracks police arrests, harassment, citations and other enforcement through
public health orders related to the pandemic.
Purnell received her juris doctorate from Harvard Law School, her bachelor of
arts degree from the University of Missouri- Kansas City, and studied public policy
and economics at the University of California- Berkeley as a public policy and international
affairs law fellow. Her writing has been published widely, including in The Oxford
Handbook of Race and Law in the United States (forthcoming), The Harvard Journal of
African American Policy, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Magazine,
Boston Review, Teen Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. Purnell has lectured, studied, and
strategized around social movements across the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium,
South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
She is currently a columnist at The Guardian and a scholar-in-residence at Columbia
Law School.
For more information, contact the Sociology and Criminal Justice Department at
985-549- 2110 or soccj@southeastern.edu.
