RESEARCH
As a public sociologist and critical ethnographer, Dr. Battle is committed to research centered around social justice following the traditions of Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois. Her work has received national recognition, both in and outside the discipline of Sociology and institutions of higher education. She has been awarded more than $1 million in external grants and fellowships to support her scholarship and related community work, including grants from the National Science Foundation, Institute for Research on Poverty, Arnold Ventures, Jessie Ball duPont Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and Borealis Philanthropy.
Dr. Battle is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Comunidades Confined Lab (CCL) with Dr. Andrea Gómez Cervantes, a center for research and activism with and for communities experiencing surveillance, criminalization, & state violence. The CCL focuses on community-engaged work for transformative change in partnership with those most impacted by the harms of confinement & organizations committed to eliminating these harms. Confinement is defined broadly—both keeping people in a space, like an institution or location, as well as keeping people out of spaces, like countries or access to resources. The CCL includes Community Research Associates, a Project Manager, and many undergraduate and graduate student researchers, as well as nearly ten community organization partners, including grassroots organizations, pro bono legal representation, and reentry organizations. There are several ongoing projects housed in the CCL, including projects on abolition, carceral logics, child support enforcement, eviction, and immigration.
The current focal project of the CCL, funded by a $550,000 National Science Foundation grant and grants from the Institute for Research on Poverty, Arnold Ventures, and Wake Forest University, examines community supervision programs in the criminal legal and immigration systems. A significant dimension of the US carceral state exists outside the walls of formal settings, in the communities where millions are under state supervision in a variety of “community corrections” programs, including 3.7 million people on probation, parole, and electronic monitoring in the criminal legal system and more than 4.7 million immigrants on the “non-detained docket” in the immigration system navigating similar types of supervision programs, including Alternative-to-Detention (ATDs). This community supervision creates what scholars have called “carceral citizens” who lack the freedom and autonomy held by those they live alongside despite being at home. This project adds empirical evidence to understanding these experiences by examining community supervision programs from the perspectives of the state, supervised individuals, and their families.
Check out Dr. Battle's CV for more on her research and scholarship.
Select Publications
Abstract: The US criminal punishment system, undergirded by carceral logics that center retributive punishment for all measure of offenses, has extended far beyond the walls of formal institutions of incarceration as a shadow carceral state, including into the institution of the family. Families, particularly those of color and who are low-income, face these carceral logics in systems expected to provide support and services, but that often reinforce and reproduce the criminal punishment system's structural violence and retributive responses. We contribute to the understanding of the carceral state's impact on families by conceptualizing the family policing industrial complex through a synthesis of the carcerality experienced by families in two sites—the immigration system and the child support enforcement system. We conclude by calling for the abolition of this complex, exploring transformative justice-oriented remediations of its harm found in various alternative responses to policing families.
Abstract: The well-known movement chant “we keep us safe” disrupts carceral logics that deem policing—and the criminal punishment system more broadly—as sites of public safety and protection from violence and instead situates the source of safety within the community. Nevertheless, activist calls for community-centered alternatives to harm and violence occur alongside increasing backlash from media, legislators, and community members alike, who assert that, while flawed, police remain crucial for public safety—claims grounded in carceral feminist approaches to violent crime. More specifically, supporters of police as the site of safety commonly raise concerns related to victims of gendered intimate partner and sexual violence. In this article, we draw on 131 interviews from two studies with community activists, antiviolence advocates (both within and outside the state), and survivors to examine how they make sense of abolition and transformative justice in relation to their own lives, their work, their communities, and the state. Although participants may not use the actual language, our findings highlight abolition feminism as the framework guiding their critiques of the criminal punishment system, their visions for safety, and the everyday nuances they identify in seeking responses to gendered harm and violence beyond policing.
Abstract: In this conversation between Brittany Pearl Battle and Tamara K. Nopper (facilitated by Antonia Randolph), two sociologists who have been involved in a variety of social justice struggles (e.g. prison abolition, worker’s rights, Asian American rights), describe the everyday practices that make up struggles for social justice. They identify a spectrum of practices that individuals can do to bring about a more just world, while arguing that all practices towards justice do not constitute organizing or activism. Moreover, they describe the salience of their status as workers and women of color as structuring the ways they have pursued social change at different points in their lives. In so doing, they identify academia as a workplace rather than being an academic as a status as the salient force that shapes how they work to build a more just world. Ultimately, the article questions the usefulness of the designation scholar-activist, opting to recognize the unique role of activists in social change while affirming that we all bring what we can to struggles for justice.
Abstract: Compelling parental responsibility through punitive enforcement mechanisms is the central focus of child support system enforcement. Although much is known about noncustodial parents’ experiences in the system, less is known about how this site of state intervention shapes the definition and expectations of parenthood and family. Observations in five courts and child support related sites were conducted over 18 months. Interviews were also conducted with child support system workgroup members. The racialized, gendered, and classed stereotypes that undergird the system’s definition of parental responsibility are grounded in controlling images of parenthood and family, prioritizing financial support above any other contributions of parents. Court officials wielded this expectation of parental responsibility to punish—or threaten to punish—noncustodial parents, resulting in significant material and symbolic consequences. The carceral logic of parental responsibility in this site underpins punitive state policies, procedures, and practices around nonpayment of support and other acts of noncompliance, reproducing racialized, gendered, and classed social controls of parenthood and family. As a result of this logic, the child support system plays a significant role in shaping the institutions of parenthood and family, (re)produces the expansion of the carceral state, and contributes to broader family inequality. Addressing family inequality should attend to the pervasiveness of the carceral logic of parental responsibility in the child support system and beyond,
Abstract: The police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the first half of 2020 sparked a powerful movement against police violence, white supremacy, and the carceral state with millions taking to the streets in the U.S. and globally. The movement coalesced around calls for police accountability, and to defund and abolish the prison industrial complex. While these calls for abolition were certainly not new, they reached national dialogues in a way not previously experienced. Although there are significant projects exploring abolition as a theory, there is not much scholarship on the specific area of the social movement that advocates for the abolition of police and prisons in practice. In this paper, I use an intersectional framework to explore participation in movement spaces, critiques of the criminal legal system, and visions for alternatives to the system among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and multi-racial women and non-binary activists and organizers who engaged in the uprising of 2020. The findings reveal important insights into how white supremacy and patriarchy interplay with activism and the carceral state, as well as impact the possibilities for the transformation of the criminal legal system. Ultimately, experiences with intersectional oppression and state violence were central to this group’s commitment to the practice and promise of abolition rooted in the ethos of Black radical feminism.
Abstract: We offer an invitation to the Du Boisian paradigm for family science. We outline this paradigm in relation to Guba and Lincoln’s ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions and our addition of the phenomenological question. A Du Boisian paradigm meets the need for a social justice orientation in social science scholarship, which is equipped to identify, contextualize, and respond to oppression across the globe. A social justice orientation recognizes the centrality of the carceral state and racial capitalism and tends to their ramifications in seeking the transformation of the conditions that produce harm. We offer historical and contemporary examples from diverse disciplines on myriad topics to highlight social justice-oriented scholarship that has already done the work of pushing the bounds of how we engage with academic research, theory, and praxis, as well as points of consideration for work yet to be done in service of eradicating oppression.
Dr. Battle can be reached at battleb@wfu.edu.