The Cops Off Campus Research Project is coordinated by an all-volunteer collective of abolitionist researchers, including:
Audrey Beard is a freelance researcher and software developer in Brooklyn. Their academic work is concerned with the construction of AI “ethics” and the political work done by AI, machine learning, and computer vision algorithms. Like many others, she began to see her activism efforts as a part of the abolitionist struggle in May 2020, and has been reading, learning, and trying to aid since. They’ve got a long way to go, but they’re here for it. (For more, see AudreyBeard.com)
Abigail Boggs teaches sociology and is affiliated with the feminist, gender and sexuality studies department and the education studies minor at Wesleyan University. She is writing a book tracing a transnational genealogy of US higher education through the figure of the noncitizen student. (See this website for more info.)
Emma Glennon is a research fellow and data scientist at the University of Cambridge, where she studies epidemics and how we can better respond to them. She sees the prison industrial complex (including policing in schools and in the name of protecting health) as among the most severe barriers to public health and well-being.
Brendan Hornbostel is a doctoral student in the history department at George Washington University, studying histories of American policing through the lenses of counterinsurgency, political economy, race, gender, and colonialism. They live, struggle, and organize to build abolitionist spaces in Washington, DC.
Eli Meyerhoff works at Duke University as coordinator of the Health Humanities Lab and is a visiting scholar in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. He recently published a book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (Minnesota, 2019), and is on the collective of Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics. (For more info, see this site)
Nick Mitchell teaches feminist studies and critical race & ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. (For more info, see this site)
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein is an adjunct based in Albany, NY. He received his doctorate in American Studies from NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and is writing a book about the history of university food service, maintenance, and custodial workers in the second half of the twentieth century. (For more, see this interview with him)
Helena Wippick is a quantitative social science researcher, particularly interested in eliminating sources of structural inequality. Her work has spanned how group-based biases develop, monitoring of NY state prisons, and designing and evaluating interventions to reduce the consequences of poverty. She is trying to learn how research can go beyond being extractive, and instead be a generator of change.