As a PhD student and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California Santa Barbara, Melanie Brazzell studies gender, critical criminology, and social movements. Melanie’s dissertation focuses on transformative justice alternatives to prison and policing, particularly for gender-based violence. Drawing on their involvement in the feminist anti-violence movement in both the U.S. and Germany for over fifteen years, Melanie’s participatory research and community engagement are housed within the “What Really Makes Us Safe?” Project. Melanie is currently exploring research as a movement building tool through research collaborations with the Momentum Community, the UC Berkeley Center on Democracy and Organizing, and the Ford Foundation’s Realizing Democracy Project. Melanie has joined the SNF Agora Institute’s P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University as a pre-doctoral fellow (2021-22) to continue this work. To better understand connections between violence and gender, Melanie has served as a research assistant to Dr. Tristan Bridges and Dr. Tara Tober since 2018, helping to build the most comprehensive existing dataset on mass shootings in the United States. Melanie is passionate about pedagogy, having worked for eight years in Berlin as a teacher at a co-operative, democratic high school for non-traditional adult students, which won the Bosch Foundation’s prize for best schools in Germany in 2016. Melanie received a Bachelor’s from Columbia University and a Master’s from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.