David J. Knight
Research Interests
Bio
David J. Knight is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. A political sociologist of the carceral state, David is interested in how social and political change occurs in contexts of historical marginalization and dispossession. Specifically, he studies the consequences of mass imprisonment and how communities, notably Black communities, experience and mobilize in response to it. This research agenda spans several subfields ranging from the sociology of mass incarceration and race and ethnicity to social movements and health and medical sociology.
David’s published work has focused, for example, on the life-course consequences of long-term imprisonment beginning in youth and the unintended consequences of housing and residential mobility on voter participation. In related work, David has also studied the possibilities and constraints of reparations policies and the role of collective mobilization in promoting equitable health outcomes among historically excluded populations.
His research, which uses data ranging from in-depth interviews to large-scale experiments, has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences among other venues.
Currently, David is principal investigator of two major projects. The first project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is a multi-state study of the rise of local health equity interventions following the 2020 protests against police violence and mass criminalization. The second project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, establishes the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab (Movements Lab), a multiplatform project of public sociology that uses oral history, archival, and survey methodologies to document histories of anti-carceral movement activity.
David earned his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and his doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Recent Grants
Mellon Foundation Imagining Freedom Initiative Grant R-2306-15878 to fund the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab (Principal Investigator and Director) ($1,716,000)
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Evidence for Action Grant 80638 (Principal Investigator) ($550,000)
