Soros Justice Fellowships

Institute for Community Peace

A grant to develop and promote solutions to violence that do not rely exclusively on the criminal justice system, and teach young people touched by violence to use visual and performing arts to build safety, peace, and justice. The project will document and disseminate effective nonviolent methods for promoting safety and work to gain support for these alternatives.

McCants is a teacher, scholar, organizer, and cultural worker. As a member of the Justice 4 DC Youth Coalition, Blackout Arts Collective, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, she has worked to transform D.C.'s juvenile justice system, build public awareness of the prison-industrial complex, and promote the need for community-based solutions to violence against women and girls of color. As an instructor at the University of Maryland-College Park, she has taught classes in American studies and African-American studies, as well as in a new field she identifies as carceral studies: the systematic study of incarceration and other forms of confinement. McCants is the founding director of the Carceral Studies Working Group at the University of Maryland-College Park, a campus-based initiative that works to counter mass incarceration through research, teaching, and activism. She is working to complete her PhD in American studies with a certificate in women's studies at the University of Maryland-College Park, and received undergraduate degrees in journalism and interdisciplinary studies from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Washington, D.C. |  1 Year |