Annual Phillip J. Bowman Lecture

Held in March of 2025, the Bowman Lecture featured a panel of abolition educators and activists, including Mariame Kaba, Dr. Beth Richie, and Avalon Betts-Gaston. The conversation featured a discussion about abolition, dismantling the prison industrial complex, and what time it is on the clock of the world.

The event was part of a year of special events to celebrate IRRPP’s 25th Anniversary in 2025.

The 2024 Bowman lecture featured a panel of presenters exploring how people are building collective futures by reimagining the value of housing not as a commodity for individual profit but as a collective right to struggle for. They discussed the work of the National Public Housing Museum, which is the nation’s only museum dedicated to preserving the collective voices, memories, and the histories of public housing residents nationwide. They also discussed Carehaus, the nation’s first intergenerational care-based co-housing project where older adults, caregivers and their families live in independent living units clustered around shared spaces. And they also discussed how limited equity housing co-ops like the Pilsen Housing Coop are creating alternative models for home ownership that can stem displacement in communities facing gentrification. Panelists included:

• Mary Pattillo (Northwestern University)
• ShaDawn “Boobie” Battle (National Public Housing Museum)
• Karen Leon (Pilsen Housing Coop)
• Ernst Valery (EVI Corp)
• and moderator Lisa Lee (National Public Housing Museum)

The 2023 Bowman speaker was Shawn Ginwright, Professor of Education in the Africana Studies Department and a Senior Research Associate at San Francisco State University. In his keynote, Dr. Ginwright identified four myths of social movements, uncovering a set of deeply ingrained beliefs that ultimately hold us back from healing and achieving sustainable, systemic change. He shared why these frames won’t work and instead, proposed four pivots:

• more impactful activism
• building transformative relationships
• stronger, healing-centered leadership
• championing equity and hope in educational settings and beyond

Shawn Ginwright, PhD, is a leading innovator, provocateur and thought leader on African American youth, youth activism and youth development. In addition to being a Professor of Education at San Francisco State University, he is also the founder and chief executive officer of Flourish Agenda, Inc., a research lab and consulting firm whose mission is to design strategies that unlock the power of healing and engage youth of color and adult allies in transforming their schools and communities. Dr. Ginwright’s new book is The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves.

For a webcast of this event, please follow this link. 

The 2022 Bowman Lecture speaker was Dorothy A. Brown, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University Law School. For her Bowman lecture, Dr. Brown discussed her latest book, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — and How We Can Fix It, which demonstrates how American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing Black people further behind. From attending college to getting married to buying a home, Black Americans find themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to their white peers. The results are an ever-increasing wealth gap and more black families shut out of the American dream.

For a webcast of this event, please follow this link. 

In the U.S., the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd reignited racial justice and abolitionist movements that have been met with state repression. Across the globe, movements to occupy land from South Africa to Brazil and movements to end military occupations from Palestine to Crimea face uncertain futures. The 2020-2021 Bowman Lecture speaker was Dr. Vijay Prashad who addressed the possibilities of social and economic transformation and how researchers can work in consultation with social movements during these times of global upheaval and social change. Dr. Prashad is an historian, public intellectual, author of 30 books, and founder and executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, a movement-driven research institute committed to promoting social and economic transformation based in Buenos Aires, Johanesburg, New Delhi, and São Paulo.

For a webcast of this event, please follow this link. Our thanks to CAN TV for broadcasting this event.

Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the April 2020 Bowman Lecture was cancelled and we hope to reschedule this event in the future. The scheduled event was to be a panel discussion with experts, educators, and practitioners working in diverse efforts across the city to use data to transform Chicago’s criminal legal system. Panelists were to discuss their work related to ending the Chicago Gang Database, overseeing the Chicago Police Department, journalism related to police conduct, and how data is being used to change sentencing practices in Cook County.

Panelists were to have been Janae Bonsu, Organizer, Scholar & former BYP100 National Co-Director & National Public Policy Chair, Andy Clarno, Coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group and Associate Professor of Sociology & Black Studies at UIC, Joe Ferguson, Inspector General for the City of Chicago, Jamie Kalven, Executive Director of the Invisible Institute, Matthew Saniie, Chief Data Officer for Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, Beth Richie, Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice & Black Studies at UIC (Discussant), Phillip Bowman, Director of the Diversity Research and Policy Program and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Michigan (Moderator)

The 2019 Bowman Lecture consisted of a panel of speakers who presented their vision and roadmaps for how Chicago Public Schools can achieve greater racial justice. Each engaged with what it means to demand the impossible in education, starting with the need to understand the world as it is and then commit to collective actions to build a new world. The interconnection of demands around education to demands around housing, health, economic, and criminal justice was a common theme as they addressed how we can find greater racial justice in our public education system and society at large.

Panelists were Bill Ayers, UIC Educator and Education Activist, Eve Ewing, University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, Erica Meiners, Education & Women’s and Gender Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, Isaura Pulido, Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, Dave Stovall, African American Studies & Criminology, Law and Justice at UIC, and Elizabeth Todd-Breland, History at UIC.

For a webcast of this event, please follow this link. Our thanks to CAN TV for broadcasting this event.

The 2018 Bowman Lecture speaker was Mary Pattillo, the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. For her Bowman lecture, Dr. Pattillo discussed Chicago’s black population decline and its roots in a racial history and public policies that have been detrimental to black Chicagoans even as the city remains a center of black life, joy, and creativity.

For a webcast of this event, please follow this link. Our thanks to CAN TV for broadcasting this event.

The 2017 Bowman Lecture speaker was William Darity Jr., the Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University. For his Bowman lecture, Dr. Darity drew on the critical research from his book, From Here to Equality (co-authored with Kristen Mullen). The talk addressed the importance of a program of reparations for black Americans that can achieve the goals of acknowledgement, redress, and closure after the grievous injustices that occurred in the US after slavery.

For a webcast of this event, please follow this link. Our thanks to CAN TV for broadcasting this event.

The 2017 Bowman Lecture speaker was Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Duke University. For his Bowman lecture, Dr.Bonilla-Silva discussed the institutional role of diversity in the university and how the diversity agenda feeds the mythology that we are a color-blind society that leaves us less capable of addressing the reality that racism remains a collective, structural phenomenon that is fundamentally about racial domination.

The 2015 Bowman Lecture speaker was Professor Dorothy Roberts, the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. An acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law, Dr. Roberts spoke about her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, which examines how the myth of biological concept of race—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era.

The 2014 Bowman Lecture speaker, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is the Harvard Law School Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Founding and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Dr. Ogletree’s lecture focused on his lifetime of national and international research and legal work to create a more just legal system that will secure the rights guaranteed by the Constitution for everyone equally under the law.

For this Bowman lecture, Sylvia Puente, Executive Director at the Latino Policy Forum, discussed the main finding of their report, Fuerza Latina: A Paradox of Success and Hardship, that Illinois Latinos are both succeeding and struggling at unprecedented levels. For example, as the number of “high-earning” Latino households in Illinois doubled, the number of Latino children living in poverty rose by 50%. While an unprecedented 90% of Illinois Latino children now have access to healthcare, two-thirds of Illinois Latinos are classified as obese. While Latinos accounted for half of the increase in owner occupied homes over the last decade, more than half are now applying an unsustainable 30% of their income towards housing costs. This bifurcation of our communities must be in the forefront of our work as we build an “Agenda for the Future.”

Download the Fuerza Latina powerpoint presentation by Sylvia Puente.