Criminology

Fresh from his playwrighting workshop, Clayton Nascimento is back with an acting workshop organized by Department of Criminology, Law & Society (CLS) Assistant Professor Eraldo Souza dos Santos and PhD student Caro Mooney, presented by UC Irvine's Illuminations: The Chancellor's Arts & Culture Initiative, and co-sponsored by the School of Social Ecology's CLS department, UCI's Poetic Justice Cluster and International Center for Writing & Translation and CAPES Brazil's Brasil Initiative.

Brazilian actor and playwright Clayton Nascimento, author of and actor in the award-winning and worldwide celebrated monologue MA-CA-COS (“MON-KEYS”), will offer two workshops (on acting and playwriting, respectively) to the UC Irvine community in events organized by criminology, law & society Assistant Professor Eraldo Souza dos Santos and PhD student Caro Mooney and co-presented by Illuminations: The Chancellor's Arts & Culture Initiative.

In the award-winning MA-CA-COS, Nascimento sheds light on his life as an Afro-Brazilian man in one of the countries where young men like him are most often murdered by the police. The monologue became famous for its political and theatrical intensity, blending biting humor with social critique. One of its most notable achievements was bringing attention to the case of Eduardo, a Brazilian boy murdered by police in 2015, which led to the case being reopened in Brazilian courts. 

During his stay at UCI, Nascimento will offer two one-hour workshops to our community. The first is this playwright workshop based on MA-CA-COS, which encourages participants to draw on their lived experience to shape a monologue or play. 

Funded by the Valuing Open and Inclusive Conversation and Engagement (VOICE) Initiative of the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, The Voices of Democracy: A Festival of 10-Minute Monologues will be staged at UC Irvine. 

An interdisciplinary group of UC students, professors, staff, and a vice chancellor, along with a group of external writers, reviewed about 100 submissions and selected three winners, according UCI Assistant Professor Eraldo Souza dos Santos, the organizer of this first-ever event in the UC system. 

First Place: Tlaloc Rivas, HOWL 

"Los Angeles. Present day. Mateo, a young man who runs a small, grassroots collective that rescues the pets of families swept up by ICE raids, stands alone in a cramped, makeshift shelter from his garage—surrounded by cages of anxious dogs and silent cats—trying to record a video to raise funds and awareness. As he attempts to deliver a simple pitch, he stumbles into a deeper story: Each pet carries a name and an address, a ghost of a life interrupted, and Mateo himself is haunted by his own proximity to disappearance. With every retake, his scripted plea crumbles into a raw plea about injustice, the loyalty of our pets, and how it ties into the history of America itself." 

This seminar begins from a place rarely visited by institutional studies of democracy: listening. Methodologies drawn from oral history, sociology, anthropology, and literary journalism open access to dimensions of democratic life that escape analyses centered on norms, institutions, and formal rights—affects, frustrated expectations, everyday forms of belonging and exclusion, and the memory of what was once lived as promise. 

The second axis addresses the complementary movement: How investigating life stories, and the literary writing built from those accounts, does not merely record the particular but makes it possible to formulate hypotheses and sustain analyses of macro-historical processes. Drawing on the workshop leader's experience writing O que é Meu (What is Mine) and Geração Democracia (Generation Democracy), he will discuss how individual trajectories can serve as a key to reading broader transformations in a society.

This workshop is part of the project “Critical and Interpretive Methods in Law and Society: A Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars” (2025 LSA Advance Grant). Please register to participate and receive the readings. Graduate student Julia Dias of the UC Irvine Department of Political Science chairs the event.

Illuminations: The Chancellor's Arts & Culture Initiative presents a special film screening, panel discussion and exhibit.

First, the Oscar-nominated, 37-minute documentary I Am Ready, Warden rolls in McCormack Screening Room. The film chronicles the final days leading up to the execution of John Henry Ramirez in a Texas prison.

Next, a panel assembles in the Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive exhibit space across from Langson Library. Panelists are the film’s producer, acclaimed journalist Keri Blakinger, and MacArthur Grant winner Andrea Armstrong, a law professor renowned for documenting deaths in Louisiana prisons. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage with Blakinger and Armstrong about their different approaches to documenting death and dying in prison.

Do immigrants commit more crime than non-immigrants? The data tells a different story than the headlines.

The Prosecutors Alliance Third Thursday conversation this month is with Charis E. Kubrin, Chancellor's Professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine and co-recipient of the 2026 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. 

Professor Kubrin has spent her career studying the immigration-crime link, and she's breaking down what decades of research actually show — not what gets repeated online.

This is a conversation about facts, not talking points. Bring your questions.

It's free to attend this virtual event. Attendees are eligible for 1 hour of Elimination of Bias CLE Credit in CA (pending in CO/VA).

Criminology, law & society Professor Charis Kubrin is the guest speaker at the General Meeting of Canyon Democrats. Fresh off receiving the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for her myth-dispelling research into immigrants and crime, Professor Kubrin will show what the data indicate about one of the hottest topics in the country.

Members of Canyon Democrats reside in Mission Viejo, Lake Forest, Rancho Santa Margarita, Laguna Hills, Foothill Ranch, Coto de Caza, Ladera Ranch and the communities of Traduce Canyon, Santiago Canyon, Silverado Canyon, Modjeska Canyon and more.

The club's mission is the advance the well being of member communities through growth and development of the Democratic Party and a progressive Democratic agenda. 

Videos of General Meetings are posted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@canyondemocrats

UC Irvine Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law & Society Eraldo Souza dos Santos hosts the Western Political Science Mini-Conference History & Politics.

Here is the schedule (all times are Pacific Time):

1-1:30 p.m.: Ekaterina Olson Shipyatsky, political science/University of Michigan: “‘A Stone Under History’s Wheel’: Genocidal Violence and the Politics of Curation”

1:30-2 p.m.: Brent Horning, study of religion/UC Davis: “A Return to Madness: Flows and Intensities”

2-2:30 p.m.: Joseph Ward, politics and international relations/University of Oxford: “Disciplined Historian, Unlicensed Heretic: Remembering Elsa Goveia in the Black Radical Tradition”

2:30-3 p.m.: Michael Theodore, criminology, law & society/UC Irvine: “Policing Dissent: The Racial Politics of the Agitator Trope from King to Trump”

3-3:30 p.m.: Caro Mooney, criminology, law & society/UC Irvine: “The Paradox of the Erased Disobedient: Trans Illegibility and Civil Disobedience”

3:30-4 p.m.: Jonathan Ahrens, history/UC Davis: “Crazed by Longism: Black Share Our Wealth Clubs and White Supremacist Terror”

4-4:15 p.m.: Break

4:15-5 p.m.: Keynote speaker Marcus Lee, African and African American studies/Princeton University: “Whose Rustin?”

Culturally, in our modern carceral state, we mostly have one story of the incarcerated, reinforced by texts and images that deal in a concrete way with who inhabits our prisons and why they are there.  And those who are incarcerated have a reductive image of themselves, reinforced by labels and the very environment into which they are confined.

To learn how reform of criminal prosecution and courts affect policing and crime, Dorothy Kronick studied the introduction of a new code of criminal procedure in Colombia. Though the new code primarily targeting prosecutors and judges, her research found that police behavior changed in response: the arrest rate dropped 45%, and arrests for minor offenses declined even more. But crime did not increase, according to administrative and survey data, and perceptions of public safety improved. This was attributed to an improvement in court accuracy. These findings underscore the value of considering strategic interaction among the police, prosecutors, and judges.