MIRG - METROPOLITAN INTERDISCIPLINARY READING GROUP 2021-2022
As a featured book club of CESPS and constituted around the study of public safety, place, intersectional identities, and social inequality, MIRG utilizes historic and ethnographically informed manuscripts to build a diverse community of change-agents --- a community of public safety-oriented people empowered by the utilization of a qualitative based epistemology with thick description, namely ethnographic stories.
MIRG maintains that ethnographically rich stories, while distinctly nonfictional, depicts a complex social reality that renders clear the meaningful ways people go about their daily lives both grappling with the joys and pains they confront in society. Moreover, these types of stories powerfully resonate
with the reading audience in a manner that has both, illuminated new possibilities for improved civic engagement and inspired them into action.
More than sixty years ago, Flannery O’Connor noted, “There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells” (Mystery and Manners – p. 192).
For more information and to join MIRG, please Register here
The 2021-2022 inaugural reading (July 2021), is Down Out and Under Arrest by Forrest Stuart
(Attached here is a flyer to share with your network (pdf file hyperlink active)
July 2021 - Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row by Forrest Stuart
August 2021 - Evicted: Poverty and Profit in an American City by Matthew Desmond
& Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
September 2021 - Race, Place and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort by Andrea S. Boyles
October 2021 - American On Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence by Elizabeth Hinton
November 2021 - My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, by Resmaa Menakem
December 2021 - Black In White Space [The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life] by Elijah Anderson
January 2022 - Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman by Joyce A. Ladner
February 2022 - The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore's Racial Divide by Lawrence Lanahan
March 2022 - Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America by Ms. Charisse Jones and Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden
April 2022 - Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in American Court by Matthew Clair
May 2022 - No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing by Waverly Duck
June 2022 - White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Racial Divide Carol Anderson