Past Events

“Skye Gosselin and Adan Abdikadar: Conversations on Crime and Justice in Maine” (February 28, 2023) was a class session for CRM 217 featuring youth organizers from Maine Youth Justice and Maine Inside Out discussing the state’s criminal legal system. They examined the campaign to close Maine’s youth prison and highlighted the broader struggles for transformative justice led by young people directly impacted by incarceration.
“Tina Heather Nadeau: Conversations on Crime and Justice in Maine” (February 23, 2023) was a class session for CRM 217 featuring one of Maine’s leading criminal defense attorneys discussing the realities of the state’s criminal legal system. Drawing on her extensive appellate and trial experience, Nadeau examined the structural challenges facing indigent defense, the stakes of criminalization in Maine, and ongoing efforts to advance justice through litigation, advocacy, and public engagement.
 “Making Sociology Work” (April 12, 2022)
In this virtual panel discussion, Sociology alumni discuss their trajectories in grad school or employment and share advice. Professor David Everson hosted. The panelists were Paige Barker, Billale Fulli, Asher Havlin, Jaime Myers-McPhail, and Mark Noyes. 
“Privilege Narratives of Settler Colonialism: Racism and Indigenous Peoples” (November 15, 2021)
In the third installment of our Sub/Versions lecture series, Professor David Everson discussed  the often submerged topic of racism toward Indigenous peoples in the United States, and how our dominant racial narratives serve to uphold the white-Native racial order. 
“Ending Police Surveillance in Maine?” (March 9, 2021) examined the Maine Information Analysis Center (MIAC)—the state’s post-9/11 fusion center for intelligence gathering and information sharing—amid whistleblower allegations and the #BlueLeaks disclosures that exposed political bias, protest surveillance, and routine overreach. USM criminology professors Brendan McQuade, author of the award-winning Pacifying the Homeland on fusion centers, and moderator Ragini Malhotra were joined by ACLU of Maine policy counsel Michael Kebede, policing scholar Alex Vitale, and abolitionist technologist Sarah Hamid to explore MIAC’s role in Maine, the legislative push to regulate or close it, national movements to defund policing, and abolitionist approaches to resisting carceral technologies.
“The End of School Policing?” (March 5, 2020) brought author Alex Vitale together with Portland Police Chief Frank Clark, School Board Chair Roberto Rodriguez,  South Portland School Resource Officer Al Giusto and a Maine Youth Justice Executive Director Al Cleveland for a conversation—moderated by Professor Brendan McQuade—critically examining the harms of school policing and the possibilities for its abolition.