The annual John Ll J Edwards Memorial Lecture is delivered in honour of the Centre’s founder, Professor John Ll J Edwards. This event is presented by the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and co-sponsored by Woodsworth College and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.
Please note: Registration for the 2023 Edwards Lecture is currently at capacity. Please join the waitlist to be contacted should spaces become available. A recording of the lecture will be available online after the event.
The 2023 John LI J Edwards Memorial Lecture
Dorothy E. Roberts
George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School "Family Policing and the Carceral Web: A Call for Abolition"Thursday, January 19, 2023 Doors open at 3:30 p.m. The Edwards Memorial Lecture will begin at 4:00 p.m. Debates Room (Room 2034), Hart House, 7 Hart House Circle 
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Abstract
In Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, acclaimed legal and social science scholar Dorothy Roberts draws on decades of research and activism to expose the foundational racism of the child welfare system. She argues that it is a “family policing system” that is deeply entangled with criminal law enforcement in a carceral web, designed to put Black families under intense state surveillance and regulation, to drive Black children to juvenile detention and imprisonment, and to promote a carceral logic that impedes needed social change. She calls for dismantling this destructive system as we reimagine how to support families and keep children safe.
About Professor Roberts
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on race, gender, and class inequities in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive freedom, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997/Vintage, 2017), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001), and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011), and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.
Roberts has served on the boards of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Center for Genetics & Society, and National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and her work has been supported by fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Fulbright Program, Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Northwestern Institute for Policy Research. Recent recognitions of her work include 2022 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 2022 Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize; 2021 Rosie Jimenez Award, Abortion Liberation Fund of PA; 2019 Honorary Doctor of Law Degree, Rutgers University-Newark; 2019 New Voices for Reproductive Justice Voice of Vision Award; 2017 election to the National Academy of Medicine; 2016 Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; 2015 American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.
Directions
This event will take place in the Debates Room (Room 2034) on the second floor of the Hart House Building. Signage will be posted throughout the building to direct you.
By transit: The closest subways are St. George or Museum station
Parking: Due to construction, there is no on-site parking available. Street parking options are below:
- On Hoskin St. by the hour
- There is a large lot at 9 Bedford and it's about a 12-minute walk to Hart House.
For more visitor info, please visit: harthouse.ca/about/visitor-info
If you are a person with a disability and require accommodation, please contact us at crimsl.communications@utoronto.ca and we will do our best to make appropriate arrangements.
