Anna DalCortivo
267 19th Ave S
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
Anna DalCortivo (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research lies at the intersection of law and society, social movements, crime and punishment, urban governance, and public policy. Across her work, she examines how communities govern beyond formal legal institutions, asking how law, social movements, and community governance shape one another through everyday practices and collective action. Using qualitative and community-engaged methods, her research reconceptualizes public safety as relational infrastructure, showing how communities produce safety, accountability, and democratic governance while exposing the racialized, classed, and gendered inequalities embedded in systems of punishment.
Her dissertation draws on five years of ethnographic research, fifty-nine interviews, hundreds of archival materials, and visual-spatial analysis to examine how a protest site and memorial built in the wake of a police murder, became enduring civic infrastructure for care, accountability, and public safety. By tracing how residents collectively construct norms, sustain care, and govern shared space, the project bridges socio-legal and social movement scholarship and advances a broader research agenda on alternative governance, democratic participation, and institutional change. Her award-winning scholarship has appeared in Mobilization and Contexts, with public-facing writing published in The Nation and The Society Pages. At the University of Minnesota, she is an award-winning instructor whose teaching spans law and society, crime and punishment, social movements, sociological theory, qualitative methods, race, class, and gender, and community-engaged research.
Educational Background
- M.A.: Sociology, University of Minnesota, 2023
- B.A.: Sociology and Criminology, Villanova University, 2018
Specialties
- Law and Society
- Social Movements and Urban Governance
- Crime and Punishment
- Race, Class, and Gender
- Sociological Theory
- Qualitative Methods
- Community-Engaged Research