Tonight: Curbing Violence in Our Communities — Is There Hope?

"The Interrupters," a citically acclaimed new documentary film by "Hoop Dreams" producer/director Steve James and bestselling author-turned-producer Alex Kotlowitz, chronicles a year in the life of Chicago as it grapples with urban violence. The film, which debuts 9/2-7 in Berkeley and San Francisco theaters, and airs nationally in early 2012 on PBS Frontline, tells the moving and surprising story of three dedicated individuals who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they, themselves once employed. These "violence interrupters" (their job title) who have credibility on the street because of their own personal histories -- intervene in conflicts before the incidents explode into violence. Their methods are informed by Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who is founder and director of CeaseFire, the organization that employs the interrupters. Slutkin believes that violence is like the great infectious diseases and the strategies to slowing it parallel those used to reverse any epidemic.

The award-winning film offers hopeful new insights for how communities can curtail the destructive force of violence. Kotlowitz, the author of the influential book There are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, joins a panel of UC Berkeley and school/community experts to discuss the schools of thought on why the violence and how we can derail it.

Panelists
Alex Kotlowitz, Jabari Mahiri, Emily Ozer, Ron Smith, Susan Stone
Moderator: Cynthia Gorney

Sponsors
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education
UC Berkeley School of Journalism
UC Berkeley School of Public Health
UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare

Participant Profiles

Panelists listed alphabetically

Alex Kotlowitz is the producer of The Interrupters, and the award-winning author of Never a City So Real, The Other Side of the River and the national bestseller There Are No Children, which The New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most influential books of the twentieth century. Kotlowitz's work, which one reviewer wrote "informs the heart", has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Granta and The Chicago Tribune, as well as on PBS (Frontline) and on public radio's This American Life. His play An Unobstructed View (co-authored with Amy Dorn) premiered in Chicago in June of 2005. He's a writer-in-residence at Northwestern University, and has also taught at Dartmouth, the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. A former staff writer at The Wall Street Journal,his journalism honors include the George Foster Peabody Award (radio), the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award (print), the George Polk Award (television) and the Thurgood Marshall Award (print). He is also the recipient of seven honorary degrees.

Jabari Mahiri is a professor at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education and chair of its Language, Literacy and Culture Program. He teaches classes on issues in urban education as well as on new literacy practices of digital youth. He is a Senior Scholar for the Question Bridge: Black Males Project and faculty director for the Bay Area Writing Project. He has written articles like "Black Youth Violence has a Bad Rap" for professional journals and his current book Digital Tools in Urban Schools: Mediating a Remix of Learning (2011) also deals with issues of youth and violence in the context of urban schools. Additionally, Mahiri is the author of Out of Bounds: When Scholarship Athletes become Academic Scholars (2010) with Derek Van Rheenen and Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools (1998). He is editor of "What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth" and the forthcoming book, Virtual Lives: Nerdfighters, the Cutting Nation, Little Sisters, Future Souls, and Future Schools. Before coming to Berkeley, Mahiri helped found the New Concept School, an independent school in Chicago that has been in existence for 35 years, and he was a credentialed English teacher in Chicago Public Schools for seven years. He received his Ph.D. in English (Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric Emphasis) at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Emily Ozer is an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, where she teaches graduate courses in behavioral science theory, mental health, community interventions and program evaluation. Her research interests are school and community-based interventions, violence prevention, promotion of mental and physical health among adolescents and trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. She is particularly interested in how the school and classroom contexts in which prevention programs are implemented affect outcomes, approaches to engaging young people as collaborators in health promotion. Her current research involves a multi-method study of the impact of an empowerment-oriented participatory research intervention on adolescents attending San Francisco public schools. In her work, she seeks to bridge collaborative-participatory approaches to conducting interventions with traditional scientific designs by testing the impact of intentional variation in collaborative processes. Ozer has written extensively about the impact of violence on urban adolescents in several professional journals. She received her Ph.D from UC-Berkeley in 1999 in clinical psychology with an emphasis on community psychology.

Ron Smith is principal at West Oakland Middle School where he is coordinating a community health center, a multi-million dollar modernization project and a curriculum redesign. He has served diverse communities all over Oakland: he taught in Oakland for seven years before becoming assistant principal at Claremont Middle School, then principal at Laurel Elementary School from 2006-2011. Smith is interested in how African American males view themselves in the educational arena and how they use their vast home knowledge and apply it to their daily academic development, as well as how educators can combine multiple resources to favorably impact inner city youth and families. He graduated from the Principal Leaders Institute at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education in 2003 with an M.A. in Education and an Administrative Service Credential.

Susan Stone is an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, where she teaches Human Behavior and the Social Environment, Research Methods, and Social Work and Education. Her research interests include family and school influences on child and adolescent school performance, especially for urban and at-risk children and youth; parenting under stress; family treatment; linking families, schools, and communities; school-based social work practice; mixing quantitative and qualitative methods; and multi-level statistical modeling. Her most recent book,School Social Work: An Evidence Informed Framework for Practice, is the first work that synthesizes the evidence-based practice process with recent conceptual frameworks of school social work clinical practice offered by leading scholars and policymakers. Stone earned her bachelors, masters and Ph.D from the University of Chicago.

Community youth representatives TBD

Moderator
Cynthia Gorney is a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism. She joined their faculty in 1999 after a career at The Washington Post that included serving as an award-winning national features writer, South American bureau chief and the first writer for the Post’s Style section based on the West Coast. She is the author of Articles of Faith: A History of the Abortion Wars, and has written for many magazines, including The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, Runners World, O: The Oprah Magazine, and theAmerican Journalism Review. She is currently a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. Gorney is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. She has also worked as a visiting Poynter Institute teacher, a newsroom writing coach and consultant, and a host and interviewer on "Forum," the Northern California public affairs radio program on KQED-FM.