About

Shannon Malone Gonzalez (she/her or they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Faculty Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their research draws from black feminism and critical criminology to examine the relationship between marginality and policing—in particular how black women and girls experience, understand, and resist police surveillance and violence. She is especially interested in institutional and communal knowledge production processes used to conceptualize, track, and address police violence and other types of violence on the margins. Shannon is from Jackson, Mississippi where they earned her B.A. from Tougaloo College. She received her M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin where they also completed doctoral portfolios in Applied Statistical Modeling and Women’s and Gender Studies. In addition to research, Shannon engages in photography, creative writing, southern food and music, and beloved black, queer, and feminist communities.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Criminology
• Social Science
• Gender studies
• Anthropology
• Social psychology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Abolition Feminist Storytelling as Methodology: Lessons Within the Stories We (Re)Tell About Punishment and Violence

  Feminist Criminology · 2026-04-22

  article

  This paper engages abolition feminist storytelling as a methodology for feminist criminologists to identify, reflect on, grapple with, and ultimately confront carceral logics in the stories we (re)tell about violence and punishment. Drawing on over a decade’s worth of research, advocacy, and community organizing, we identify three carceral tensions that emerged within our own storytelling: the victim-offender binary, researcher complicity, and a survivor standpoint. Building on prior black feminist scholarship, we then illustrate how an abolition feminist approach to storytelling allows us to confront these tensions through relationality, an ethic of love, accountability, vulnerability, and commitment to justice.

  PublisherDOI

• Perpetual encounters: reconceptualizing police contact and measuring its relationship to black women’s mental health

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-12

  articleOpen access

  Research and media discussion of police contact routinely conceptualize it as time-constrained interactions between officers and civilians. However, extant literature documents preparation for encounters and post-encounter advocacy, which each challenge restricted understandings of contact and, importantly, its relationship to mental health. We introduce “perpetual encounters” to both theoretically and empirically move closer to the temporally unbounded and enduring way that police contact is experienced in black women’s everyday lives. Utilizing a novel, nationally representative dataset on their policing experiences, we explore how mental health is independently and conjointly associated with three dimensions of police contact: preparation, police stops, and advocacy against police violence. Beyond exemplifying how pervasive the police are in the day-to-day lives of marginalized communities, extending the scope of contact recognizes preparation as a significant threat to mental health and advocacy as a health-promoting activity. This study supports moving beyond discrete notions and measurement of police contact to process-oriented understandings and relational modeling.

  PublisherDOI

• A Conversation on Race and Colorism in Social Forces

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  It is now widely recognized in sociology that racialized inequality is a persistent structural phenomenon that infiltrates every aspect of life. However, at the inception of <em>Social Forces</em> in 1922, dominant perspectives on race and inequality spanned a continuum, from biological racism &mdash; focused on inherent biological inferiorities &mdash; to paternalistic attitudes guided by desires to help those deemed less fortunate. The leadership of the journal originally held similar views (see Kalleberg and Newell 2022). Yet, with significant changes to society, politics, and culture, scholarship published in the journal on race and racism incorporated different perspectives of racialized inequality and helped to capture the consequences of its ubiquity.

  PublisherDOI

• The diversity officer: Police officers' and black women civilians' epistemologies of race and racism in policing

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-09

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Diversifying police forces has been suggested to improve "police-minority relations" amidst national uprisings against police violence. Yet, little research investigates how police and black civilians-two groups invoked in discourse on "police-minority relations"-understand the function of diversity interventions. We draw on 100 in-depth interviews with 60 black women civilians and 40 police from various racial and ethnic backgrounds to explore how they understand the function of racial diversity in policing. Findings highlight discrepancies in how these two groups frame the utility of racial diversity in policing, revealing conflicting epistemologies of race and racism. Police draw on an epistemology of <em>racial ignorance</em> (Mills 1997, 2007, 2015) to selectively accommodate race-conscious critique while denying the history and power dynamics between the institution and minority communities. Conversely, black women civilians, grounded in a <em>standpoint epistemology</em> (Collins 1986, 2009), emphasize the historical roots of policing, along with collective memories and lived experiences to understand the relationship between the institution and minority communities. Through a comparative analysis of these frames, we theorize dominant/state-sponsored discourse on diversity and police-minority relations as form of <em>racecraft</em> (Fields and Fields 2012, 2014) that serves to legitimize negligible institutional change to policing in an era of renewed scrutiny of police racism.

  PublisherDOI

• Perpetual encounters: reconceptualizing police contact and measuring its relationship to black women’s mental health

  Social Forces · 2025-05-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Research and media discussion of police contact routinely conceptualize it as time-constrained interactions between officers and civilians. However, extant literature documents preparation for encounters and post-encounter advocacy, which each challenge restricted understandings of contact and, importantly, its relationship to mental health. We introduce "perpetual encounters" to both theoretically and empirically move closer to the temporally unbounded and enduring way that police contact is experienced in black women's everyday lives. Utilizing a novel, nationally representative dataset on their policing experiences, we explore how mental health is independently and conjointly associated with three dimensions of police contact: preparation, police stops, and advocacy against police violence. Beyond exemplifying how pervasive the police are in the day-to-day lives of marginalized communities, extending the scope of contact recognizes preparation as a significant threat to mental health and advocacy as a health-promoting activity. This study supports moving beyond discrete notions and measurement of police contact to process-oriented understandings and relational modeling.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Secrets of Silence

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-09-30

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “We Got Witnesses” Black Women’s Counter-Surveillance for Navigating Police Violence and Legal Estrangement

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Police violence shapes the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, and while much has been written about strategic responses to police, missing is an examination of how black women navigate interactions with officers. Based on 32 interviews with black women, we find that they use witnessing, or the mobilization of others as observers to police encounters. Research demonstrates the rising role of videos and smartphones in documenting encounters with officers. We find that black women adapt witnessing techniques based on their surroundings, available resources, and network contacts. Three forms of witnessing are observed: physical witnessing, mobilizing others in close proximity to interactions with officers; virtual witnessing, using cellphone or social media technology to contact others or record interactions with officers; and institutional witnessing, leveraging police or other institutional contacts as interveners to interactions with officers. Black women mobilize witnessing to deescalate violence, gather evidence, and promote accountability. Attuned to both the interactional and structural dynamics of police encounters, black women conceptualize witnessing as a way to survive police encounters and navigate their legal estrangement within the carceral system. We theorize black women&rsquo;s witnessing as a form of resistance as they work to reconfigure short- and long-term power relations between themselves, their communities, and police.

  PublisherDOI

• Mourning for Strangers: Black Women, Sequelae, and the Digital Afterlife of Police Violence

  Feminist Criminology · 2024-06-02 · 4 citations

  article1st author

  Based on 32 in-depth interviews with black women, this paper analyzes the racialized and gendered impact of vicarious exposure to police encounters on social media. We draw from Smith’s (2016) sequelae to describe the lingering effects of anti-black state violence, particularly grief and mourning. For Black women, the manifestation of sequelae from online exposure includes: a) amplification of police brutality, b) identification with victims, c) expressions of grief, and d) prolonged mourning. We argue research should contend with the digital landscape when examining psychological effects of police violence to understand anti-black police violence’s impact on gendered racial mental health disparities.

  PublisherDOI

• The diversity officer: Police officers' and black women civilians' epistemologies of race and racism in policing

  Law & Society Review · 2022 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  (Fields and Fields 2012, 2014) that serves to legitimize negligible institutional change to policing in an era of renewed scrutiny of police racism.

  PublisherDOI

• A Conversation on Race and Colorism in <i>Social Forces</i>

  Social Forces · 2022-07-20 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Samantha Simon

  New England Baptist Hospital

  2 shared

• Shantel Gabrieal Buggs

  1 shared

• Faith M. Deckard

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Taylor W. Hargrove

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared

• Katie Kaufman Rogers

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared

• J’Mauri Jackson

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared