Scholar · Author · Advocate
Assistant Professor, Department of Black Studies
University of Rochester
Researching how policing, punishment, housing, and surveillance shape everyday life — and how communities build alternatives grounded in care, repair, and collective well-being.
Philip V. McHarris is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Frederick Douglass Institute at the University of Rochester, where he is one of the inaugural faculty members of the newly established department.
His research brings together Black Studies, abolitionist thought, Black Geographies, and urban sociology to analyze the spatial and institutional organization of safety. His overarching research initiative, The Decarceral Futures Project, treats safety not as something enforced through control, but as something produced through material conditions, political decisions, and social relations.
Previously, he was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab.
Legacy Lit / Hachette
Examines the historical expansion of policing as the dominant response to social harm and demonstrates how reform-based approaches consistently reproduce violence. Argues for safety built through investment, community infrastructure, and non-carceral responses to crisis.
Reviewed by Social Forces, Contemporary Sociology, Souls, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
Princeton University Press
An ethnography centered on a high-rise public housing development in Brooklyn, New York (NYCHA). Explores how residents navigate safety, policing, building conditions, and cycles of poverty amid decades of state divestment.
The Unfinished Project of Public Housing
"Decarceral Geographies: Black Art, Spatial Reuse, and the Afterlife of a Police Precinct"
Antipode
"Abolition as Decolonization: Toward a New World"
Journal of Social and Cultural Possibilities
"Assata Shakur and the Politics of Fugitivity"
Columbia Journal of Race and Law
"Policing the University: Protests, Police Power, and Reimagining Safety"
Fieldsights (with Kristin Doughty)
"Disrupting Order: Race, Class, and the Origins of Policing"
Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police (Haymarket Press)
"The Spillover Effects of Police Violence"
Social Psychological Review
"Race and State in City Police Spending Growth: 1980 to 2010"
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 3(1):96-112 (with Robert Vargas)
Commentary featured on HBO, CNN, TIME, PBS, and other major outlets.
Named one of the 100 Most Influential African Americans (2020)
Princeton University