Brittany P. Battle

Dr. Brittany Pearl Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department and Affiliate Faculty in the African American Studies Program at Wake Forest University. She is also the co-founder of Triad Abolition Project, a grassroots organization based in Winston-Salem, NC, working to dismantle the carceral state. Her research agenda includes social and family policy,
courts, social justice, and carceral logics. She teaches courses on social justice, abolition and transformative justice, and courts and criminal procedure. She is currently working on a book manuscript (under contract with NYU Press), Policing Parenthood, which examines the carceral logics of the state’s intervention in the family in the child support system. She is also currently working on a project examining the perspectives of abolitionist activists and organizers who were involved in the 2020 uprising, a project examining evictions in Forsyth County, NC during the Covid19 pandemic, and a project exploring the experiences of the criminal legal system defendants and asylum seekers under various forms of state surveillance and community confinement. Her community work regularly includes political education, direct action, healing and transformative justice work, and civic engagement. Her praxis of scholarship and activism has been recognized with the 2022 Eastern Sociological Society’s Public Sociology Award, 2021 Sociologists for Women in Society’s Feminist Activism Award, and the 2020 Praxis Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice. She is also a recent Fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty’s Emerging Poverty Scholars Program and a recent Ford Postdoctoral Fellow.

Curriculum Vitae

COURSES TAUGHT

SOC 151:  Principles of Sociology
SOC 341:  Criminology
SOC 338:  Courts and Criminal Procedure in the Era of Mass Incarceration
SOC 344:  Social Justice in Theory, Method, and Practice
SOC 390: Defund, Transform, Abolish?: Reimagining Justice