David J. Knight is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at Yale University, where he is also part of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. A political sociologist of the carceral state, David investigates how communities experience mass incarceration and mobilize in response to it. This research agenda sits at the intersection of sociology, Black studies, and political science, and it spans several cross-disciplinary fields ranging from carceral studies and social movements to public policy and health.
David’s published work showcases these themes. Using data ranging from in-depth interviews to large-scale experiments, he has detailed the “carceral passages” that Black boys and men traverse as they come of age while enduring long sentences in prison (American Journal of Sociology) as well as the long-term consequences of housing vouchers and residential mobility on the voter participation of largely Black women and Latina heads of household (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). David is also quite interested in expanding the reparations debate among social scientists to consider reparations for the harms of the carceral state, namely, reparations for survivors of police torture. Here, he led in theorizing how those most vulnerable continue to be marginalized amidst movement efforts to enact reparations at the local level (RSF Journal of the Social Sciences). This research sheds light on the underrecognized effects of incarceration on lived experiences and subjective understandings of coming of age in Black communities, and it reveals the unintended consequences of processes and policies that are meant to ameliorate or redress historical injustices by illustrating how those very policies reproduce barriers in Black communities’ access to political power.
Most importantly, David is a proponent of reckoning in new ways with the harms of the U.S. carceral state by studying the emergence and impact of Black political mobilization in response to prisons and policing. These efforts include documenting the embodied nature of threat that motivates incarcerated people to mobilize (American Sociological Review), as well as inviting social scientists to consider how dominant narratives of U.S. policing of Black communities are changed when “bottom-up” data and community-based knowledge sources are used—sources that reveal repeated yet often neglected movement histories in which local Black communities seek to secure safety and address state harm (Annual Review of Criminology).
David earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago.