The Will Miller Social Justice Lecture series brings speakers to the UVM campus and the Burlington community to provide a continuing program of radical analyses of social, ecological and political concerns.
The series is dedicated to Will Miller, Vermont’s activist philosopher and UVM Philosophy Professor for 35 years.
Turn on the local news any night this week and you’ll see the pattern Alec Karakatsanis has spent his career exposing: an urgent story about a shoplifting ring, a call for more police, a warning to stay afraid. What you won’t see on the news is a serious look at wage theft, which costs workers far more than shoplifting ever will, or an honest account of why more policing hasn’t made Burlington safer.
As Burlington debates how to respond to rising homelessness and addiction, the loudest answer is almost always the same one: more police, more power, more discretion. Karakatsanis will help us understand how that answer gets manufactured—and what a different one could look like.
Alec Karakatsanis
