This webinar, facilitated by Dr. Rebecca Atkinson (John Jay College of Criminal Justice), brings together scholars whose research examines violence and safety across public and private spaces. Drawing on research with Black women living with HIV and survivors of intimate partner violence, Dr. Kamila Alexander (Johns Hopkins University) will explore the complexity of safety within intimate relationships, including how care and harm can coexist and how institutional stigma shapes access to formal systems of support. Dr. Franklin Cosey-Gay (University of Chicago) will connect the violence we see in communities like Chicago to a longer history of segregation and disinvestment, and share how hospital-based violence intervention programs with legal partnerships are working to meet survivors' needs. They will be joined by Dr. Angel Boulware (Northwestern University) and Clarice Robinson (University of Chicago), who contributed to data collection for these projects, for a conversation about what these findings teach us about safety, access to resources, and the ways people navigate systems that have not always been designed to serve them.

Together, the panel will challenge simple distinctions between “safe” and “unsafe” and between public and private violence, asking instead what becomes possible when research takes seriously the historical, structural, relational, and deeply human dimensions of how people experience and pursue safety.

This webinar is intended for anyone interested in developing, supporting, and leading impactful gun violence research in partnership with communities.