Margaret Goldman received her PhD in Criminology, Law & Society, with an emphasis in Race & Justice, from the University of California, Irvine, and is currently a Robert Curvin Post-Doctoral Associate at the Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, Rutgers University, Newark. Her research explores the “entanglements” between schooling and carceral regimes, and the ways criminalized young people develop abolitionist alternatives to each. Her current project, Freeing Los Angeles: Un/forgotten Spaces and Abolitionist Education in the Carceral-Education Landscape, examines the gendered-racial links between schooling and carceral systems in South Los Angeles, through an ethnographic study of FREE LA High School: an abolitionist alternative school created for and by young people who were excluded from, or chose to leave, traditional schools. Margaret also taught and tutored at FREE LA for three years. Grounded in FREE LA’s model of transformative justice and FREE LA students’ education histories, this project considers the possibilities for abolitionist education and educational liberation beyond formal schooling. Margaret has been published in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International; Radical Teacher; Berkeley Review of Education; Race & Justice; Journal of Crime & Justice; and Criminal Justice & Behavior. She is a recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2023 Claudia Jones Award, and received support for her dissertation research as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Opportunities to support FREE LA and YJC can be found at https://youthjusticela.org/ or on YJC’s Instagram @youthjusticela.