Dr. David C. Turner III is an Assistant Professor of Black Life and Racial Justice in the Department of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. He is also a faculty affiliate with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the Faculty Director of the Million Dollar Hoods Project – a community-driven research initiative to map the fiscal and human cost of incarceration. As a movement scholar from Inglewood, California, his research broadly focuses on social movements, political identity, and resistance to the prison regime. More specifically, Dr. Turner examines the ways that Black boys and young men work to resist the carceral landscape alongside their peers in community-based educational spaces. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, including manuscripts in the American Educational Research Journal, Theory Into Practice, Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, The Journal of Research on Adolescence, Journal of Community Practice, and others. His forthcoming book, tentatively titled, “The (Good) Trouble With Black Boys – Identity, Community Power, and Reexamining Success In the Carceral State” explores some of the tensions with youth organizing and identity-driven formations in the post-Obama era, currently under contract with the University of California Press. As a community organizer, Dr. Turner brings over 15 years of movement-building experience to the classroom, having worked to negotiate and win demands for racial justice, secure funding, divest resources from carceral and harmful institutions, and coordinate actions across the state of California and the nation, all while teaching at both the K-12 and the postsecondary level.
Dr. Turner worked across LA County with boys and men of color as the manager of the Brothers, Sons, Selves Coalition, where he co-led campaigns to change school discipline practices, support investments in youth development, and end policies and practices that lead to criminalization in communities of color. For his commitment to both advocacy-based research and grassroots leadership, Dr. Turner was selected as an inaugural fellow in the John W. Mack Movement Building Fellows Program with the Weingart Foundation and a Data Fellow with the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color and the Tableau Foundation. Dr. Turner currently serves as the senior advisor for the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color. His award-winning scholarship and public engagement have been recognized by the Association of Community Organizations and Social Administration and the American Educational Research Association.
Dr. Turner has participated in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) as a political education and research specialist, helping organizations with teach-ins, designing curricula, and community-based participatory action research, most notably as a member of the research team with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and the People’s Budget, and a co-founding member of the Police-Free LAUSD Coalition. Dr. Turner has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education, NBC BLK, the Los Angeles Times, Spectrum 1 News, and the New York Times for his activism and applied scholarship.
