Combine urban, social, computational, statistical and humanist perspectives to investigating criminal justice.

Munia Bhaumik is the Program Director of Mellon Social Justice Curricular Initiatives and a scholar of comparative literature, politics, and law. An alumna of UCLA, where she received her M.A. in Urban Planning, her research and teaching engages racial and gender inequities as well as the multiple social factors impacting whose lives count before the law. Thus, in her research, she rethinks citizenship and democracy theory from the perspective of vulnerability, considering how marginalized non-citizen refugees, migrant workers, incarcerated persons, and undocumented detainees are critical social actors. Dr. Bhaumik received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley before joining the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta where she engaged with new immigrant and African-American community voting rights campaigns. Based on her research on noncitizens as well as poetry, she was awarded the prestigious Stanford Humanities and Cornell Society for the Humanities faculty fellowships. Prior to returning to UCLA as a Master’s student, Dr. Bhaumik also spent a decade as a primarily Spanish-speaking labor/community organizer and translator with some of the leading progressive organizations in Los Angeles. Her academic book, In Liberty’s Shadow: The Noncitizen in American Letters and Law, is equally motivated by close literary and theoretical readings of seminal texts defining American democratic culture, as well as the social movements for citizenship, language, queer, migrant, worker, and Black equal rights mobilized by the communities-of-color of this (post)metropolis.

Danielle Dupuy is the Director of Research and Programs at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and Executive Director of Million Dollar Hoods. Based at UCLA, Million Dollar Hood is a signature collaborative research project mobilizing critical data to map the fiscal and human impact of incarcerated lives in Los Angeles. Prior to coming to Los Angeles, Danielle worked for 7 years in Chicago, initially as a social epidemiologist at the Sinai Urban Health Institute and later as the Associate Director of the Metropolitan Breast Cancer Task Force. During that time, she worked on issues related to racial disparities and social equity in the fields of maternal and child health, breast cancer, urban agriculture, violence, and policing. Danielle obtained her PhD in Community Health Sciences from UCLA with a minor in Law to focus on incarceration and its effect on the well-being of black communities.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and is the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, Professor Lytle Hernandez is the author of the award-winning books, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).  Currently, Professor Lytle Hernandez is completing a new book on the magonista movement, which helped to spark the outbreak of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and she is the Principal Investigator for Million Dollar Hoods, a university-based, community-drive research project that maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her leadership of Million Dollar Hoods, Professor Lytle Hernandez has won numerous awards, including the 2018 Local Hero Award from KCET/PBS, a 2018 Freedom Now! Award from the Los Angeles Community Action Network, and the 2019 Catalyst Award from the South L.A. parent/student advocacy organization, CADRE. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernandez has been named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians and the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Eric Lee is a Senior Data Analyst for the Ralph J. Bunche Center and the Million Dollar Hoods Project. He graduated from Columbia University with a Masters in Public Health in Epidemiology. He has worked for Mount Sinai Hospital in the Geriatrics Department and the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) in the Mental Health Division. During his tenure at DOHMH, he was involved in projects analyzing mental health disparities for those incarcerated at Rikers Island. This project as well as his involvement in a “Race to Justice” initiative sparked in furthering his interest to understanding societal factors that lead to health disparities.

Nina Monet Reynoso currently works as a program coordinator at the Million Dollar Hoods Project and is a PhD candidate for UCLA’s Social Sciences and Comparative Education program. She was a 2020-2021 Rev. James Lawson Jr. UCLA Teaching Fellow and has taught in subjects across Black studies, labor studies, and education. Her research interests include the critical juncture between the neoliberal interventions of schools and the military industrial complex.

Mariah Tso is a GIS Specialist for the Ralph J. Bunche Center and the Million Dollar Hoods Project. Mariah received her master’s degree in geographic information systems from the University of Redlands and her bachelor’s in environment, economics, and politics from Scripps College. Her research interests include critical cartography, indigenous methodologies, and interdisciplinary storytelling.

Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA, Founder and Director of HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities and Core Faculty of Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLA. He is also the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Center for Jewish Studies; founding faculty of the Digital Humanities Program; and co-faculty PI with Juliet Williams, Darnell Hunt, and David Schaberg of the “Social Justice Curriculum” (2021-2026).

Dr. Presner is the author or co-author of four books: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007); Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007); Digital Humanities (MIT Press, 2012), co-authored with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Jeffrey Schnapp; and HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2014), with David Shepard and Yoh Kawano. Currently, he is writing a book titled Ethics of the Algorithm: Computational Approaches to Holocaust History and Memory. This project employs a wide-range of computational methods – from natural language processing to machine learning – to pose new questions of Holocaust history and memory, asking what it means for algorithmic methods of analysis to be ethical and how they can complement humanistic interpretations and values.