Anthropology Annual Public Lecture to focus on juvenile violence

This year’s keynote speaker is Laurence Ralph, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, whose work as a researcher, writer and filmmaker explore how police abuse, mass incarceration and the drug trade make injury and premature death seem natural for people of color.

His upcoming keynote lecture, titled “Juvenile Murder, Vengeance, and Grief,” will examine two cases of juvenile murder in which teenage boys of color were killed by their peers, as well as consider complex questions about justice systems, violence, accountability and healing. By conducting in-depth life histories of young people who the juvenile justice system has harmed, he seeks to better understand the violence they encounter and the reasons they encounter it. Ralph argues that, as a society, our idea of accountability is incomplete. Those who the police have accused of crimes – and even those who have committed them – need to be humanized.

Ralph’s work has sought to humanize in publications like The New York Times, as well as his tenured appointments in the African & African American studies and anthropology departments at Harvard University. His first book, Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, published by the University of Chicago Press, also explored gang violence, poverty and community resilience in a west-side Chicago neighborhood. His latest book, Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence, explores a decades-long scandal in which hundreds of Black men were tortured while in police custody.