Keynote Address: Professor john a. powell

Professor john a. powell is an internationally recognized authority in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, and issues relating to race, ethnicity, poverty and the law.  He is the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.  He also holds the Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law.  He has written extensively on a number of issues including racial justice and regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, the link between housing and school segregation, opportunity based housing, gentrification, disparities in the criminal justice system, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, and racial and ethnic identity and the current demographic shift.

Previously, Professor powell founded and directed the Institute

on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota.  He also served as the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was instrumental in developing educational adequacy theory.   Prior to that he served as the Director of Legal Services of Greater Miami.

He has worked and lived in Africa, where he was a consultant to the governments of Mozambique and South Africa.  He has also lived and worked in India and done work in South America and Europe.  He is one of the co-founders of Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the board of several national organizations.  Professor powell has taught at Columbia University School of Law, Harvard Law School, University of Miami School of Law, American University, the University of San Francisco School of Law, and the University of Minnesota Law.  He joined the faculty at OSU in 2002.such as concentrated poverty, education, economic viability and urban sprawl.