Melissa Burch

Melissa Burch is an anthropologist whose research and community work focuses on the experiences of people with criminal convictions in the United States at the intersections of race, criminalization and labor. 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.