Vesla Weaver
Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Vesla Mae Weaver is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She has contributed to scholarly debates around the persistence of racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons, and the consequences of rising economic polarization. She authored the first article in nearly two decades on the topic of punishment to be published in her discipline’s top journal. She went on to co-author Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control with Amy Lerman and Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America with J. Hochschild and T. Burch.
She is at work on a new project that will map patterns of citizenship and governance across cities and neighborhoods called the Faces of American Democracy using an innovative technology that creates digital ‘wormholes’ called Portals.
Vesla joined us for our virtual Roundtable convening “Examining Justice Reform and the Social Contract in the United States: Implications for Justice Policy and Practice.”