NCID-0947
Melissa Burch
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Anthropology (University of Texas at Austin)
About
Melissa Burch is an anthropologist whose research and community work focuses on the experiences of people with criminal convictions in the United States, with an emphasis on how social hierarchies and inequalities are maintained and reproduced through processes of criminalization and punishment.
Current Work
Burch's forthcoming book: The Criminal Records Complex: race, capital and criminal risk in the US labor market, explores the discriminatory use of criminal records in the southern California job market. Through close attention to daily employment practices, the study reveals how and why criminal records exclusion actually unfolds in daily interaction, how exclusion feels and is navigated by those experiencing it, and how the use of criminal records in the labor market reinforces discrimination and widens inequality.
Burch directs the Afterlives of Conviction Project, which aims to deepen understanding of the lived experience of criminalization and make scholarly data and concepts available to organizers, educators, and policymakers in engaging and useful ways.
Research Area Keyword(s)
work and labor markets, race and racism, criminalization and punishment