Thanks to a grant from the School of Law’s Office of Intellectual Life, Professor Donna Coker has organized a symposium titled “Prison Abolition Pedagogy: Approaches to Teaching Across Disciplines.” The symposium will be held on April 14th and will highlight community-academy collaborations and classroom teaching that help students gain an understanding of the harms, scope, history, laws, and activism in resistance to the carceral state.
The one-day symposium will consist of three roundtables that will focus on different aspects of teaching: experiential, non-experiential (classroom) teaching, and restorative/transformative justice teaching. Confirmed speakers include Kele Stewart, co-director of the Children & Youth Law Clinic at Miami Law, Mimi Kim from Cal State University, Long Beach, Michelle Brown of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and Wendy Bach, University of Tennessee-Knoxville School of Law.
Professor Donna Coker teaches Evidence, Substantive Criminal Law, Gender Violence and Social Justice, Social Justice Lawyering, Restorative Justice and Law, Mass Incarceration: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies, and Criminal Justice Policy Reform. She has twice received a Provost’s Research Award (2017, 2021). Students awarded her the Hausler Golden Apple teaching award in 2015. Professor Coker served as Academic Associate Dean from 2005-2009.
