Speaker Series: Kasey Henricks

Kasey Henricks (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He likes to pursue big questions through small things. Looking at often overlooked objects of the everyday, from parking citations to lottery tickets, Kasey’s research agenda uncovers how race and class inequalities are reproduced over time through reconfigurations of public finance under late capitalism. More specifically, he has a publication record that follows a two-fold examination of 1) how seemingly face-neutral modes of raising revenue yield disparate consequences in who pays for social services and 2) the ways in which raced and classed antagonisms ideologically shape, and become shaped by, conflicts over state finance. His work documents various predatory developments in private-public “partnerships,” alongside the erosion of a social safety net, through the emergence of piecemeal revenue systems during the past half-century, showing how raced and classed dynamics are implicated in a transformation of state finance that has become increasingly regressive and upwardly redistributive to capital interests across the globe. 

Although Kasey never earned a high school diploma, he completed a PhD with distinction in the discipline of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from Austin Peay State University and an associate’s from Chattanooga State Technical Community College. Prior to arriving at UIC, he was a faculty member of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and an affiliate scholar at the Appalachian Justice Research Center. He has held fellowships at the American Bar Foundation, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law, KWI Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, and UIC’s Institute for Research on Race & Public Policy, and his research has been supported by funders like the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and Chicago Community Trust. Some of his work has been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Association of Black Sociologists, Association for Humanist Sociology, Southern Sociological Society, Eastern Sociological Society, and Southwestern Sociological Association. He is also a former doctoral fellow of the American Bar Foundation. 

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.