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.
The effort to eradicate hate requires the active participation of every component of our society, to include governments, the private sector, communities of faith and indeed every aspect of civil society. There is no more urgent task in front of us. The organizers of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit are doing the United States and the world an enormous service by tackling hatred and extremism with a focus on honest dialogue and conversation, genuine learning and practical solutions. This will not happen overnight, but the Pittsburgh community’s leadership in this effort is genuinely inspiring and motivating.
