submitted by velamcco@augsburg.edu
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, Faculty Development is pleased to announce an upcoming book club event co-sponsored with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Sociology. The featured book will be the recently published Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America (2024), by sociologist Michelle Phelps.
In the book, Phelps profiles how Minneapolis embraced police reform after the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in 2014; and yet in 2020, we were rocked by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers. As a result, Minneapolis became a national emblem for the failures of police reform. This book “shows how the dualized meaning of the police—as both the promise of state protection and the threat of state violence—creates the complex politics of policing that thwart change. Phelps’s account of the city’s struggles over what constitutes real accountability, justice, and safety offers a vivid picture of the possibilities and limits of challenging police power today.”
Copies of the book will be available during Days in May and participants will have all summer to read it in preparation for small group discussions that will be held during the CTL Back to School program in late August. You can reserve a copy of the book on a first-come, first-served basis by completing the Google Form that is available on the CTL website (look for the heading “Summer 2025 Faculty Book Club”): https://sites.augsburg.edu/ctl/.
As a special bonus, the Annual Torstenson Lecture in Sociology scheduled for the fall of 2025 will feature the author of the book, allowing an opportunity to hear more on the topic and engage in Q&A.
We hope you can join us!