Michelle Brown

Michelle Brown is a critical criminologist and visual scholar whose work focuses upon countervisual practices and strategies – how we unsee prisons, police, and empires in order to build liberatory practices. Her research and teaching areas include abolition and emergent forms of justice; critical carceral studies; law & society; and media, theory, and digital culture. In her role as co-founder and co-director of the Appalachian Justice Research Center, she manages projects that focus on the rise of the carceral state and attendant social movements directed at ending mass incarceration, building more effective forms of community safety, land justice, and shifting media narratives on crime and punishment. Brown is the author of The Culture of Punishment (NYUP); co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture, and the Palgrave MacMillan Crime, Media and Culture Book Series. She is a first-generation student: an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation (Tahlequah, OK) and of English-Scottish descent, with deep lineages in Appalachia on both sides of her family.