Joshua Aiken (he/him) is a Ph.D. Candidate in African-American Studies and History at Yale University. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in May 2024. In his dissertation “The Armed Individual: Race, Firearms Regulations, and the Rule of Law Since Reconstruction”, Joshua uses case studies to trace how the legal treatment of guns, gun manufacturers, and gun owners has reflected shifting ideas of danger, safety, citizenship, and violence as they relate to a racial distribution of harm. More broadly, his research is concerned with how oppressed people experience “equal justice under law” in the context of U.S. empire, racial capitalism, and social control.
A former Fellow at the Prison Policy Initiative and instructor with the Yale Prison Education Initiative, Joshua is interested in how constitutional, criminal, asylum, and civil rights law interacts with policing and punishment. Joshua earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis and Master’s degrees from the University of Oxford.