Berna Turam

Director, International Affairs Program; Professor, Sociology and International Affairs

• Email: b.turam@northeastern.edu

Berna Turam, the director of the International Affairs Program, is a professor of sociology at Northeastern University. She has an abiding interest in conducting research on state-society interaction, particularly on the interaction between ordinary Muslim people and the state. Her most recent work explored the interplay between the government and contested urban space. Her ethnography in Istanbul and Berlin revealed and analyzed the ways in which contested urban space generated democratic practices and freedoms that facilitate inclusion and democratic accommodation. By gendering political and spatial processes of inclusion and exclusion, she also does intersectional analysis of religion, space and gender. She is the author of Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford University Press, 2007), and Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin (Stanford University Press, 2015) and the editor of Secular State and Religious Society: Two Forces at Play in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) In addition, she published articles in journals including British Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Nations and Nationalism, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Contemporary Islam and Journal of Democracy. She co-edited a special issue, entitled “Secular Muslims?” in Comparative Studies of South America, Africa and the Middle East. Her article, entitled “Primacy of Space in Politics: Bargaining Space, Power and Freedom in an Istanbul neighborhood,” won the best article award from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 2013. Over the course of 2016, she was awarded two fellowships at London School of Economics and at Cosmopolis Department of Geography at Vrije University in Brussels. Currently, Turam serves on the advisory board of the project entitled “Understanding the Perceptions of Science in Muslim Societies.” She is also the co-PI of a newly funded collaborative project on sanctuary cities and safe places.

Serena Parekh

Director of Politics, Philosophy and Economics Program; Associate Professor, Philosophy

• Email: s.parekh@northeastern.edu

Serena Parekh is an associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is the director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program and editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy. Her primary philosophical interests are in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and continental philosophy. Her most recent book, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement, was published with Routledge in 2017. Her first book, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights, was published in 2008 and translated into Chinese. She has also published numerous articles on social and political philosophy in Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Human Rights Quarterly.

Alisa Lincoln

Professor, Department of Health Sciences; Faculty, Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice

• Email: al.lincoln@northeastern.edu

Professor Lincoln’s research examines the way that social exclusion and marginalization both contributes to and is a consequence of poor health, and specifically mental health. She examines questions related to social factors and their relationships with mental health and mental health services focusing on how social disadvantage impacts people’s mental health and their experiences and outcome in mental health care.  Her work has examined public mental health services, racial and ethnic disparities and health, and literacy and health.

Her current work includes:

1. Examining the meaning and impact of literacy (reading, numeracy and aural) in the lives of people with serious mental illness and the ways in which limited literacy serves as a barrier to recovery and participation both in the US and Australia;
2. Examining the ways discrimination, neighborhood social capital and civic participation relate to mental health status and vulnerability to radicalization among Somali young adults in four cities in the US and Canada;
3. Examining disparities in access to and outcomes of mental health care;
4. Developing public evaluation partnerships and research projects.
5. Developing innovative models by which we can increase the inclusion of communities and stakeholders in the process of research and has led some of the first federally funded studies exploring the use of Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPR) in mental health care.

Her multiple research teams also prioritize the inclusion of students through a shared mentorship approach including undergraduates, master’s level, doctoral level and post-doctoral students. She has over 20 years of continuous research funding from sources including NIMH, NIMHD, SAMHSA, and NIJ. Finally, she is the Chair of the Mental Health Section of the American Sociological Association, and an Elected Fellow in the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) and the American Psycho-Pathological Association (APPA).

Amy Farrell

Director and Professor, Criminology and Criminal Justice; Co-Director, Violence and Justice Research Lab

• Email: am.farrell@northeastern.edu

Professor Farrell is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and the Associate Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. She is also the Co-Director of the Violence and Justice Research Laboratory, housed within the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern University. She joined the tenure track faculty in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice in 2008. Prior to that time, she served as the Assistant Director of the Institute on Race and Justice and a faculty researcher at Northeastern University. Professor Farrell’s research is aimed at understanding and describing how the criminal justice system administers justice. Over the past decade she has focused much of her scholarly attention on understanding how the criminal justice system responds to the newly prioritized crimes such as human trafficking. Although not a new phenomenon, human trafficking was criminalized by the federal government in 2000. Since that time all fifty states have passed laws outlawing the practice of human trafficking and devoting resources to its identification and eradication. In support of this research, she has studied and published research about how local, state and federal law enforcement agencies identify, investigate and prosecute human trafficking cases. Additionally, she has completed research projects examining labor trafficking victimization of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals residing in the U.S. She also has conducted numerous studies examining how changes in state and federal human trafficking laws impact the identification and prosecution of human trafficking offenders. As part of this body of work, Professor Farrell has sought to understand how the public views the problem of human trafficking and what responses they expect from state and federal governments to address the problem. Professor Farrell has overseen the development of programs to collect data on human trafficking investigations for the Bureau of Justice Statistics and she has developed a data collection system to track children identified as human trafficking victims in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She testified about police identification of human trafficking before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. She was also appointed to the Massachusetts Attorneys General Human Trafficking Policy Task Force where she oversaw a committee that developed recommendations for improving the collection and sharing of data on human trafficking victims in the Commonwealth. She currently serves on the Governor’s Working Group on Child Trafficking in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

In addition to studying criminal justice system responses to human trafficking victimization, Professor Farrell has examined how variable levels of racial group and gender representation among court workgroups relate to district-level differences in sentencing. She has been engaged in research examining how jury outcomes, particularly the factors that predict and explain acquittals. She is the co-author of two books. The first, co-authored with Daniel Givelber, Not Guilty: Are the Acquitted Innocent, published by New York University Press in 2012. The second, co-Edited with Devon Johnson and Patricia Warren, Deadly injustice: Trayvon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System, New York, University Press, 2015. Professor Farrell was a co-recipient of NIJ’s W.E.B. DuBois Fellowship on crime justice and culture in 2006, a recipient of the American Society Criminology Mentor of the Year in 2014 and a recipient of NIJ’s Graduate Research Fellowship in 1999.

Betul Eksi

Postdoctoral Research Associate, GRI

• Email: b.eksi@northeastern.edu
• Phone: 617.373.2687

Betul Eksi was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Global Resilience Institute (GRI) at Northeastern University, where she received a PhD degree in sociology. She is also a former Humanities Center Post Doctoral Fellow at Northeastern University. As a political sociologist and a gender scholar, Betul has two main streams of research. She has conducted ethnographic research on political masculinities, the police, and political transition in Turkey. As one of the Co-PIs of a multidisciplinary project on sanctuary cities and immigration in the U.S., funded by the GRI, she explores perceptions and experiences of safety, inclusion, and resilience.

Carlos Cuevas

Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice; Co-Director, Violence and Justice Research Lab

• Email: c.cuevas@northeastern.edu
• Phone: 617.373.7462

Professor Cuevas received his BA from Tufts University and his PhD in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University in San Diego, CA. He is currently co-director of the Violence and Justice Research Laboratory. Professor Cuevas’s research interests are in the area of victimization and trauma, sexual violence and sexual offending, family violence, and psychological assessment. Specifically, his work focuses examining victimization among Latinos and how it relates to psychological distress and service utilization, as well as the role cultural factors play on victimization. In addition, he is studying the impact of psychological factors on the revictimization of children and how it helps explain the connection between victimization and delinquency. His most recent National Institute of Justice-funded research will examine the scope and impact of bias crime against Latinos. Other NIJ-funded collaborations include the development of instruments to evaluate bias victimization among youth and teen dating aggression. Professor Cuevas also continues to engage in clinical work, providing assessment and treatment to victims of abuse and trauma as well as sex offenders.

Martha Davis

Affiliated Faculty of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; University Distinguished Professor of Law

• Email: m.davis@northeastern.edu
• Phone: 617.373.8921

Professor Davis teaches Constitutional Law, US Human Rights Advocacy and Professional Responsibility. She is a faculty director for the law school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy and the NuLawLab. In 2015-2016, she held the Fulbright distinguished chair in human rights and humanitarian law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Lund University, in Lund, Sweden, and she remains an affiliated scholar with the institute. She is also a member of the expert pool for WaterLex, a Geneva-based development organization that advocates for water and human rights.

Professor Davis has written widely on human rights, women’s rights, and social justice issues. She is co-author of the first law school textbook focused on domestic human rights: Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (West 2014) and she co-edited Bringing Human Rights Home, a three-volume work chronicling the US human rights movement. In 2008, Bringing Human Rights Home was named one of the “best books in the field of human rights” by the US Human Rights Network. Professor Davis’s book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice, and was also honored by the American Bar Association in its annual Silver Gavel competition.

Professor Davis’ articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the North Carolina Law Review, Fordham Law Review and many others. Her most recent book is Global Urban Justice: The Rise of Human Rights Cities, in which she and her co-editors bring together academics and practitioners at the forefront of human rights cities and the “right to the city” movement to critically discuss the potential that human rights cities hold for global urban justice.

In addition to serving as an editor, Professor Davis contributed a chapter, “Cities, Human Rights and Accountability: The United States Experience.” Professor Davis co-edits the Law Professors’ Network Human Rights at Home blog. Prior to joining the law faculty in 2002, Professor Davis was vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. As a women’s rights practitioner, she was counsel in a number of cases before the US Supreme Court, including Nguyen v. INS, a challenge to sex-based citizenship laws that Professor Davis argued before the court.

Professor Davis has also served as a fellow at the Bunting Institute, as the first Kate Stoneman Visiting Professor of Law and Democracy at Albany Law School, a Soros Reproductive Rights Fellow, a fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School and fellow of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Professor Davis is an appointed member of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights