Members – CARCERAL STUDIES CONSORTIUM

Core Board

Largest Time Commitment

Core Board Membership requires a high degree of commitment to carrying out the mission of the Carceral Studies Consortium, normally equivalent to .10 FTE or greater. Core Board Members meet monthly and have full voting rights. Core Board Membership is by invitation only; if you would like to be considered for the Core Board, please email carceralstudies@ou.edu.

Core Affiliate Board

Medium Time Commitment

Core Affiliate Board Members are required to attend one board meeting per semester to maintain their membership. Each meeting will be focused on accomplishing a specific Consortium goal, such as establishing annual programming, reviewing grant applications, or outlining a symposium.

Affiliate Board

Smallest Time Commitment

Affiliate Board Members serve in an advisory capacity and are required to attend one board meeting or Consortium event per academic year to maintain their membership. Graduate and undergraduate students are eligible to apply for Affiliate Board Membership.

Join the Consortium

Faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and community members can apply to become Core Affiliate or Affiliate Board Members. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

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Core Board Members

Dr. constance chapple, Director (She/her)

Dr. Chapple is an associate professor of sociology with research specialties in the causes and consequences of crime and criminal justice involvement. Dr. Chapple has published over 28 articles, chapters, and edited books on the topics of gender and crime, family and crime, peers and crime, the social and financial consequences of incarceration and arrest and the long-term negative effects that early life-course maltreatment and adversity have on children, youths, and adults. She is a principal investigator, along with Dr. Sherri Castle, of an OU VPRP Big Idea Challenge Grant and leads a transdisciplinary team of faculty who are conducting research on “Child Wellbeing and Opportunities across the Lifespan.”

Dr. Angela Person, Past Director (she/Her)

Dr. Person is Director of Research Initiatives and Strategic Planning for the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma and lecturer in the OU Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability. In her role as Director of Research, she supports the Gibbs College in leveraging its resources to drive development of thoughtful, sustainable and experiential solutions to the design problems of the future. She also serves as Diversity Liaison for Gibbs College. Dr. Person’s research looks at relationships between social and material conditions and individual, community, and public identities. She teaches courses in architectural theory and criticism, architectural methods, environment and society relationships, political geography and human geography. Person earned her PhD from the University of Oklahoma, while studying in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability. She also has a background in museum studies (MA), environmental design (BS), and geology (minor). In her free time, she enjoys designing furniture and interiors with her friend and D-Plei Design partner, Luisa.

Majorie Callahan (She/her)

Marjorie Callahan is a Professor whose teaching prepares students for the practice of architecture and leadership roles in their communities. Business acumen and political savvy are traits her students are led to understand through intense discourse with entrepreneurs and state political leaders and lobbyists. Having received significant grant support for community-based projects, Marjorie’s studios shape a forum for students and real-world clients to exchange ideas and viewpoints. Marjorie is also a practicing architect and active artist. Designing residential scaled projects, she maintains a healthy appreciation for contracts and the intricacies of client management that eventually benefit her students in the classrooms. Her advocacy work includes serving on local civic boards, as well as the Interstate Design Standards Commissions.

Dr. Jermaine Thibodeaux (he/him)

Jermaine Thibodeaux is a native of Third Ward, Houston, Texas. For more than fifteen years, he taught history in independent schools in Houston and the Boston area. He is currently Acting Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Trained in the department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, his academic interests include African American history, Texas history, carceral studies, slavery and capitalism, and Black masculinities. He has published essays on slavery in Savannah and on various Hollywood depictions of historical topics. His most recent book chapter appears in the Colored Conventions Movement (UNC Press, 2021) and it explores the role of race and heteropatriarchy during the early Colored Conventions movement in Texas. He is presently at work on articles exploring the historic role of hyper-policing in the untimely deaths of Sandra Bland and George Floyd. Additionally, he is revising his dissertation manuscript that explores the long and sordid connections between the Texas sugar industry and the rise of the state’s penitentiary system. That project, titled, “The House that Cane Built: Sugar, Race, and the Gendered Formations of the Texas Prison System, 1842-1920,” centers the commodity of sugar in a retelling of the prison system’s history and in so doing, foregrounds Black male convicts and their labor as crucial to the establishment and growth of the Texas carceral landscape.

Dr. Sabina Vaught, Co-Founder (She/her)

Dr. Sabina Vaught is a Professor and Director of the Kinloch Commons for Critical Pedagogy and Leadership. Dr. Vaught’s research considers global carceral and liberatory knowledge movements broadly and the race-gender labor and conquest relationships among schools, prisons, and insurgent communities specifically. In her scholarly work, Dr. Vaught draws on a constellation of knowledge traditions. Her most recent book, The School-Prison Trust (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), is a co-authored ethnographic, legal, and cultural story of Indigenous self-determination and refusal in the face of school-prison conquest strategies in the long colonial war against Native peoples. Dr. Vaught’s teaching has extended to adult and juvenile prisons for state-identified women and girls, where she has facilitated Feminist Studies study groups. Dr. Vaught was a high school language arts teacher and leader in two city school districts and two bridge programs.

Tacey Shurtliff, Graduate Fellow (She/her)

Tacey is a 4th year PhD Candidate in the department of sociology at the University of Oklahoma. Her research areas include criminology, race/ethnic relations, adolescence and schools/education. She has done research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), adolescent delinquency, inequality and is currently working on her dissertation looking at the impact of changes in school curriculum on school climate and adolescent outcomes. Tacey is expected to finish her Doctorate in Spring 2025.