MPRC Seminar – In-Person / Hybrid
Speaker: Becky Pettit, University of Texas at Austin
Title: Racial Polarization in Attitudes Towards the Criminal Legal System
Date: Monday, September 12, 2022
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Note: This will be held as an in-person seminar that will also be held hybrid. For the best experience of the speaker, we encourage in-person for all possible. Please therefore register using either the link for the in person RSVP or using the registration link for the virtual zoom meeting. Same seminar, but please register for the method you are able to attend.
About the Speaker
Becky Pettit is the Barbara Pierce Bush Regents Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a sociologist, trained in demographic methods, with interests in social inequality broadly defined. Much of Professor Pettit’s past and present research estimates the demographic contours of exposure to the criminal legal system as well as the consequences of system involvement for social and economic inequality and its measurement. Her book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress (Russell Sage Foundation 2012), investigates how decades of growth in America's prisons and jails obscures basic accounts of racial inequality. Pettit’s research has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, MSNBC, and numerous other media outlets. She has been invited to speak at the White House, the Congressional Budget Office, the Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Census Bureau, and many colleges and universities. Professor Pettit teaches courses on social inequality, methods, and statistics. She edited Social Problems, the official journal of the Society of the Study of Social Problems, from 2011-2014 and was on the advisory board of the General Social Survey from 2017-2021. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University and a B.A. in sociology from University of California at Berkeley.
Seminar Format
Location IN PERSON: 1101 Morrill Hall. We are requesting advanced registration so that we can track capacity.
Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM: Hybrid Zoom Link to Register will be provided one week in advance of the seminar. Upon registration you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar.
