STRENGTHENED BONDS: ABOLISHING THE CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM AND RE-ENVISIONING CHILD WELL-BEING

Columbia Law School Columbia Journal of Race and Law

Volume 11 Symposium

June 16-18, 2021

DAY ONE

June 17, 2021 11:00 am to 6:00 pm EDT

• Panel 3: Family Surveillance (2:30 – 4:00 pm)

o J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Director of We Be Imagining, Calculating the Souls of Black

Folk: Predictive Analytics in the New York City Administration of Children’s Services

o Charlotte Baughman, LCSW., Tehra Coles, Attorney, Jennifer Feinberg, Attorney, and Hope Newton, Parent Advocate, The Center for Family Representation, The Surveillance Tentacles of the Child Welfare System

o Victoria Copeland, Ph.D. Student, Department of Social Welfare, Luskin School of Public Affairs, UCLA, It’s the Only System We’ve Got: Exploring Emergency Response Decision-Making in Child Welfare

o Tarek Ismail, Associate Professor of Law at the CUNY School of Law The Consent of the Compelled: Child Protective Agents as Law Enforcement Officers

o Moderator, Kelley Fong, Assistant Professor, School of History and Sociology, Georgia

Tech

• “Coffee Break” (4:00 - 4:15 pm) (Breakout rooms available to meet with panelists and attendees)

Note: If you wish to assign yourself to one of the many breakout rooms, you must have Zoom Desktop client or mobile app version 5.3.0 or higher or ChromeOS version 5.0.0 (4241.1207) or higher.

Panelist Biographies

J. Khadijah Abdurahman is a child-welfare system abolitionist whose research focus is the New York City Administration for Children's Services' adoption of automated decision systems, and an independent researcher specializing in content moderation and surveillance in Ethiopia. She is the co-founder of Word2RI, an oral history archive of racial justice and gentrification on Roosevelt Island, and director of We Be Imagining, a public technology project that examines race and technology through a blend of academic discourse and the performance arts, in partnership with Columbia University’s INCITE Center and The American Assembly’s Democracy and Trust Program. Khadijah is also a visiting researcher and lecturer at Cornell Tech in the Milstein Program. She is currently working on a paper about how social media has facilitated calls for genocide in Ethiopia in addition to other forms of mis/disinformation that have produced geopolitical destabilization.

Charlotte Baughman is a Senior Staff Social Worker at the Center for Family Representation (CFR), an interdisciplinary legal services organization that supports and represents parents impacted by New York City’s family regulation system. Prior to joining CFR in 2017, Charlotte worked as a therapist with a prevention services program at the New York Foundling and as a healthcare integrator at New Alternatives for Children’s Bridges to Health program. Charlotte holds a Master in Social Work degree from New York University.

Tehra Coles is a litigation supervisor at the Center for Family Representation (CFR). For the past 10 years she has represented respondents caught in the family regulation system in Manhattan and Queens. She supervises CFR's government affairs and policy work and routinely works with colleagues and coalitions fighting for needed legislative change and the dismantling of the family regulation system. Previously, she worked at the Albany County Public Defender's Office as an assistant public defender and the New York State Defenders Association. She graduated from Hollins University with a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Master’s degree in Social Science and from Albany Law School in 2009.

Victoria Copeland is a Ph.D candidate at the University of California Los Angeles. Her current research investigates the use of surveillance and data-sharing infrastructures within “the child welfare system”. Additionally, she is interested in exploring how various alternatives to criminalization can be used to address interpersonal violence and harm caused to children.

Jennifer Feinberg is a Litigation Supervisor at the Center for Family Representation (CFR). She joined CFR’s Queens practice in 2013 and has been practicing in Manhattan Family Court since 2016. Jennifer represents parents in abuse and neglect proceedings and is part of CFR’s Government Affairs and Policy team. Prior to joining CFR, Jennifer was a Law Fellow in The Bronx Defenders Family Defense Practice. Jennifer is a 2012 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School where she was a student attorney for the Child Advocacy Law Clinic, and received her BA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006.

Kelley Fong is assistant professor of sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in sociology and social policy from Harvard University in 2020. During her doctoral studies, she conducted extensive fieldwork on child welfare system processes and experiences in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Her research has appeared in venues such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Children & Youth Services Review, and The Imprint. Presently, she is working on a book manuscript about the limitations and costs of channeling family adversity through a system organized around child abuse and neglect.

Tarek Z. Ismail is an Associate Professor of Law at the CUNY School of Law. Prior to joining CUNY Law’s faculty, he served as Senior Staff Attorney at the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project, which primarily aims to address the legal needs of Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and other communities in the New York City area that are particularly affected by national security and counterterrorism policies and practices deployed by various law enforcement agencies.

Hope Lyzette Newton was awarded sole legal custody twice while navigating multiple systems including Bronx Family, Housing and Criminal Court as well as the New York City Committee for Special Education for at least a decade before she became a parent advocate with the Center for Family Representation in 2015. A Bradley University alum, Hope currently serves on the New York State Office of Children and Family Services Parent Advisory Board, Chairperson of Rise Advisory Board and Treasurer for Voices of Women Organizing Project (VOW). She also serves on both the Steering and Outreach Committee for the Healing Centered Schools Working Group.