TERENCEKEEL
PROFESSOR, AUTHOR, & DIRECTOR OF THE BIOCRITICAL STUDIES LAB
CORONER REPORTS PROJECT
Death under the U.S. Medical Examiner/Coroner System
This project investigates the history and current practices of the United States medical examiner/coroner system. The work reveals how the entanglement of law enforcement, forensic pathology, and ethical nihilism produce forms of state violence and biomedical racism that target BIPOC communities who are killed while in police custody in the streets and in carceral institutions throughout the United States. The collaborative dimension of this work involves a public facing data science project done in partnership with Dignity and Power Now,
Dr. Nick Shapiro’s (UCLA) Carceral Ecologies Lab, Dr. Lauren Brown's (SDSU) Linked Fate Data Collective , Professor of Law Aziza Ahmed (UC Irvine School of Law), and my own BioCritical Studies Lab. This collaboration has produced several forthcoming reports and also serves as the basis for my single-authored book, Society after Nihilism: The Medicolegal Erasure of Accountability at the end of American Life.
Media and Reports
A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime
2021
RAND report: Deputy cliques pose problems for LASD
2021
Collaborators
Helen Jones
Community Activist and Organizer | Robert Wood Johnson IRL Fellow
Jonah Walters PhD
BCS Lab Postdoctorate Fellow
Lauren Brown PhD, MPH
Gerontologist | San Diego State University
Nick Shapiro
Assistant Professor | Founding Director of Carceral Ecology Lab
Maggie Woodruff
JD
Anthropology PhD Student | University of California, Irvine
Partners
