Dr. Jean Beaman presented on “Towards a Reading of Black Lives Matter in France: Diasporic Connections and Global Social Movements”

On February 7, 2024, the Transformative Justice in Education Center hosted Dr. Jean Beaman speaking on “Towards a Reading of Black Lives Matter in France: Diasporic Connections and Global Social Movements.” Beaman discussed her ongoing ethnographic research on anti-racist mobilization and activism against police violence in the United States and worldwide. Beaman addressed what it means to consider Black Lives Matter in a society that disavows race and racism and how anti-racist activists in France, many of whom are Black and Maghrébin origin, assert a place for themselves in a society that continually marginalizes them.

Jean Beaman, PhD is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with affiliations with Black Studies, Political Science, Feminist Studies, Global Studies, and the Center for Black Studies Research. Previously, she was faculty at Purdue University and held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute. Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her current book project is on suspect citizenship and belonging, anti-racist mobilization, and activism against state violence in France. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. She is also an Associate Editor of the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and a Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques. She is the Co-PI for the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant, Race, Precarity, and Privilege: Migration in a Global Context” for 2020-2022 and a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences for 2022-2023.