Amber J Powell
Affiliations
Amber Joy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her current research interests include law, punishment, racialized gendered violence, and youth justice. She is also a former Sexual Assault Survivor Advocate volunteer in Milwaukee, WI. Her prior research (with Heather Hlavka and Sameena Mulla) draws on ethnographic observations to examine how legal actors construct narratives of credibility in child sexual assault jury trials across systems of race, gender, age, and sexuality. She has also worked with Michelle Phelps and Christopher Robertson, exploring how North Minneapolis residents, activists, and law enforcement officials understand police reform. As the 2020-2022 American Bar Foundation Law & Inequality Fellow and Ruth Peterson Fellow, her dissertation explores youth's, advocates', and correctional personnel's constructions of sexual victimization and coercion in youth confinement. Amber Joy is also a regular contributor to The Society Pages, writing on a range of topics including sexual assault, prisoner reentry, and racial disparities among youth of color. You can find her work in Gender & Society and The New Handbook of Political Sociology.