This is an in-person, on-campus event for UofG Staff and Students Only.  A valid UofG Staff or Student email address is required to book your ticket.  The venue is to be confirmed. 

PhD candidate, social justice activist, and author Barbara Becnel has more than 20 years of experience working for prison reform in the state of California, while writing nine award-winning non-fiction books on street gang culture, as well as over one-hundred journal, magazine, and newspaper articles.  From leading an international media campaign aimed at preventing the judicial execution of reformed Crips gang co-founder and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Stanley Williams, to organising an ‘Occupy San Quentin’ rally attended by hundreds in front of the state prison that houses California’s death chamber, she has often shown inspiring leadership and tenacity. Recently, she was appointed to an Expert Steering Group for tackling racial harassment in Scottish education. She also participated in a Steering Group focusing on the development of anti-racist curriculum for Scotland’s universities and colleges.  

Building on her MSc in Social Justice and Community Action (With Distinction) earned from the University of Edinburgh, Barbara returned there to pursue a PhD. Her thesis explores how death row became a symbol of heroism for America’s street-gang generation. Integral to this is her collaboration with three former-though-imprisoned South Central Los Angeles gang members who are co-researchers on the project.

Barbara's talk will explore the ’in between’ of her life journey, which ultimately saw her reject her middle-class upbringing of instruction by her mother, a high-school principal, to look white, to talk white, to be as white as she could be, culturally, to succeed as an African American professional in a white-dominated nation.  The transformation process is examined in her presentation at the University of Glasgow. Barbara will also critique why such a transformation has led to a new social-justice battleground for her: reforming the academy’s elitist traditions in knowledge production.