Dr. Alessandro Morosin

Before happily arriving here at ULV, I taught at DePauw University and the University of San Diego. My classes explore structural inequalities and conflicts that people experience in the legal system, crime, policing, prisons, borders/migration, and gender relations.

Since liberal arts education is about freedom and making a better world (not just about getting a job or technical training), I enjoy supporting students in their academic journey to integrate critical thinking and community engagement into their identities, supporting them to become leaders in different areas of their lives. I also like to open things up by inviting other working professionals, community organizers, activists and guest authors to my classes and to the campus.

I have taught 20 students how to take their favorite topics and convert them into viable research projects that will earn them their undergraduate degrees in Sociology or Criminology.

When I am doing research over the winter or summer break, I am usually in Oaxaca, Mexico. I interview and support indigenous people who are trying to protect their communities by confronting large mining companies and other forms of dispossession. My first book will be based on this participatory action research with pueblos indigenas and defensores del territorio in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Research and Teaching Interests

power and inequality, critical criminology, prison abolition, globalization, social movements, ethnography, systemic racism, resistance, environmental justice, resource extraction, Mexico and Latin America

ULV Classes:

Introduction to Sociology (First Year Leaning Experience- FLEX), Law and Society, Sociology Senior Thesis, Political Economy of Crime, Introduction to Criminology