Norman Conti
Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts
2022
Norman Conti is a professor of sociology and the coordinator of Duquesne’s Social Justice Association. Along with six men serving life sentences at the State Correctional Institution in Pittsburgh, Dr. Conti founded the Elsinore Bennu Think Tank for Restorative Justice (EBTT). Together, they developed Police Training Inside-Out, a criminal justice course that brings police recruits together to study as classmates with incarcerated men. After the prison closed, the EBTT was reestablished on campus at Duquesne as a weekly conference of community activists, returning citizens, artists, political leaders and police officers. Dr. Conti has served as a Fellow in Duquesne’s Center for Community Engaged Teaching and Research and is a longtime member of the national steering committee for the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. His scholarly work has appeared in The American Sociologist; Counter-Stories and Counter-Spaces; Dialogues in Social Justice; Federal Sentencing Reporter; Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education; Journal of Contemporary Ethnography; Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education; Kalfou; The Police Journal; Police Practice & Research; Police Quarterly; Policing & Society; The Prison Journal; Social Network Analysis; Studies in Symbolic Interaction; and Voices From Criminal Justice.
My network of professionals working on countering hate in all its forms grew exponentially after attending Eradicate Hate in 2021. The myriad voices represented at Eradicate Hate, from big tech companies to academic researchers to those with lived experience, reinforced to me the importance of cross-cutting and collaborative approaches to counter hate and its devastating impacts on society. I’ve been fortunate to sustain and build those networks with many of those I met at Eradicate Hate in 2021.
