Kaelyn Sanders Receives ASC Fellowship
October 23, 2024
Kaelyn Sanders, Doctoral Student in the School of Criminal Justice, has received an American Society of Criminology Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship for Racial and Ethnic Diversity.
The American Society of Criminology only provides three of these Fellowships per year. Applicants from underrepresented groups in the field of Criminal Justice are encouraged to apply. Funds from the Fellowship are to be used to continue the completion of doctoral degree programs and research.
“Receiving this award means so much to me, as many scholars I admire (including my chair Dr. Jennifer Cobbina-Dungy) also won this award while in graduate school. Black and other racially/ethnically minoritized students continue to be underrepresented in the field of criminology and criminal justice. So, awards like the Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship are needed not only to support our degree completion but also to build a community of scholars that understand what it’s like navigating academia as a racially/ethnically minoritized scholar.” The fellowship also comes with an $8,000 stipend that Sanders will utilize for her dissertation research which uses qualitative interview data from 72 Black returning citizens to explore their experiences with digital inequality after release from prison.
Congratulations Kaelyn, this is well earned!
------
Kaelyn Sanders is a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Using critical and intersectional frameworks, Kaelyn’s research sits at the nexus of community supervision, reintegration, and inequality, and her dissertation research qualitatively explores digital inequality among Black returning citizens. Kaelyn’s past research has been published in Feminist Criminology, Crime & Delinquency, and the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.
As a Ph.D. Candidate, Kaelyn has worked on program evaluation projects for community-based reentry and gun violence programs in the state of Michigan and serves as the graduate assistant for her program’s Prospective Doctoral Student Recruitment and Retention Program Grant. In this role, she works to increase DEI in her graduate program by meeting with students at minority-serving institutions and assessing areas where current graduate students can be better supported. She previously held a summer graduate research associate position at Arnold Ventures working on their pretrial justice team and interned at a local probation and reentry program in Lansing, Michigan.
Kaelyn is also a 2024 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an alumni of The Ohio State University, where she received her B.A. in Sociology and Criminology.