Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership Employment Committee January 25th Meeting 

The meeting will feature a special presentation by Melissa Burch.  Melissa Burch will share the results of her 2014-15 study: Navigating the Criminal Records Complex: Hiring and Job-Seeking in the Inland Empire.  The study sheds new light on the problem of employer reluctance to hire workers with criminal convictions by analyzing how criminal records are considered in the hiring process.  While we often frame employer's decisions as based primarily in personal values or beliefs, the study reveals how increasingly, approaches to hiring, and to criminal records in particular, are shaped by a political-economic climate characterized by regulation, risk-aversion, competition and litigation.

 

Melissa Burch is an anthropologist whose scholarship analyzes how hierarchies based on race, class and gender are reproduced through processes of criminalization and punishment, with an eye toward potential routes toward greater equality and freedom.  Burch will join the anthropology department at the University of Michigan in Fall 2018 as an Assistant Professor and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of African and African Diaspora at the University of Texas at Austin.