“Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice”, a Conversation with Carla Shedd, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University

Carla Shedd is Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Columbia University.  Shedd received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and her A.B. in Economics and African American Studies from Smith College.  Her research and teaching interests focus on: crime and criminal justice; race and ethnicity; law and society; social inequality; and urban sociology.

Shedd is passionate about illuminating the plight of urban adolescents who each day confront the paradoxes of: a school system that can work to educate or criminalize them; a police department that can work to protect or harass them; and a justice system that can work to rehabilitate or damage them further. Shedd’s first book, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice (Russell Sage, Fall 2015) focuses on the city of Chicago. Centrally, the book examines the two institutions that prominently shape the lives of urban youth: the public school system and the criminal justice system. It also highlights the racially stratified social and physical terrain youth traverse between home and school.  Shedd’s exploration of the “carceral continuum” is extended in her new research capturing and analyzing the myriad legal and extra-legal attributes that impact juvenile justice processing and dispositions in New York City. Shedd has been published in various academic journals and edited book volumes.  She has also received numerous competitive fellowships and grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Consortium on Violence Research, Columbia University, and Northwestern University.