Fit to protect: race, vulnerability and the risk politics of California firefighting

Melissa Burch is an anthropologist whose research and community work focuses on the experiences of people with criminal convictions in the United States, with an emphasis on how social hierarchies and inequalities are maintained and reproduced through processes of criminalization and punishment. Her forthcoming book explores the discriminatory use of criminal records in the southern California job market. Burch directs the Afterlives of Conviction Project, which aims to deepen understanding of the lived experience of criminalization and make scholarly data and concepts available to organizers, educators, and policymakers in engaging and useful ways.

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