Faculty Profiles

Professor Jones earned her Ph.D. in Sociology and Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of expertise include urban ethnography, urban sociology, race and ethnic relations and criminology and criminal justice, with a special emphasis on the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Her first book, Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence, is published in the Rutgers University Press Series in Childhood Studies. She is also a co-editor of Fighting for Girls: New Perspectives on Gender and Violence (with Meda Chesney-Lind), Sociologists Backstage: Answers to 10 Questions About What They Do (with Sarah Fenstermaker), and Being Here and Being There: Fieldwork Encounters and Ethnographic Discoveries (with Elijah Anderson, Scott Brooks and Raymond Gunn). Her next book is based on a multi-year, neighborhood-based ethnographic study of how African American men with street or criminal histories (adults and adolescents) change their lives, and their place in the neighborhood once they do. The study is grounded in the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco and is supported by the William T. Grant Award for early career scholars (2007-2012). Professor Jones is also the recipient of two New Scholar Awards from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on People of Color and Crime (2009) and the Division on Women and Crime (2010), respectively. 

Professor Jones teaches courses in field research methods, urban sociology and criminal justice at the undergraduate and graduate level.