Faculty Research Spotlight: Dr. Mimi Kim
Dr. Mimi Kim is an Associate Professor of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach and an engaged scholar whose research interests have long intersected with her activism and advocacy in issues of racial and gender justice. Beginning with her co-founding of Incite!, a feminist of color social justice organization now known for its spearheading of prison-industrial-complex (PIC) abolitionist feminism and her subsequent establishment of Creative Interventions, an early pioneer in transformative justice approaches to gender-based violence, Dr. Kim has continued her work seeking liberatory community-based violence intervention and prevention strategies and other alternatives to criminalization.
Since 2018, Dr. Kim has been a principal investigator of a comprehensive evaluation of a multi-year restorative justice pilot project in Northern California funded by the Blue Shield Foundation of California. A unique and innovative non-law enforcement restorative justice initiative seeking community-based responses to domestic and sexual violence, the CHAT (Collective Healing and Transformation) Project provides an answer to the public’s increasing demand for restorative approaches to violence and other forms of conflict and harm. A public report based upon her evaluation findings of the pilot period will be available Spring 2022. Because of the uniqueness of the project and the contribution that the systematic evaluation offers, she plans further academic publications based upon this evaluation research in order to add to the much needed knowledge base on restorative and transformative justice.
Since the protests of the summer of 2020, Dr. Kim has become more involved in local and national efforts to build community-based non-police alternatives in the areas of violence intervention and mental health crisis response. In 2021, she co-authored a report published by the national abolitionist organization, Interrupting Criminalization, titled Defund the Police – Invest in Community Care: A Guide to Alternative Mental Health Responses, which reviews and recommends models of mental health crisis response; she is also co-hosting a series of national webinars on the topic. This work has spurred her involvement in local California and national efforts to build alternative mental health crisis responses. At the end of 2021, she joined together with other social work scholars to co-author an article on anti-carceral social work titled “Defund the police: Moving towards an anti-carceral social work.”
Dr. Kim is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of the social work journal, Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work, where she and her colleagues are honing and expanding the intellectual space for critical feminist theoretical and empirical scholarship within social work. The journal has gained a steadily growing influence within the field of social work and has started hosting webinars as part of its public education efforts – including one on “Social Work, Critical Feminism, and Sex Work” featured in February 2022 which was co-sponsored by CSULB’s School of Social Work. Dr. Kim is also co-editor of a forthcoming book on abolitionist social work called Abolitionist Social Work: Possibilities, Paradox, and Praxis which will be published by Haymarket Books in late 2022.
Recent Publications (peer reviewed):
Polk, S., Vazquez, N., Kim, M. E., & Green, Y. R. (2021). Moving from diversity to critical race theory within a school of social work: Dismantling white supremacy as an organizing strategy. Advances in Social Work, 21(2/3), 876-897. doi.org/10.18060/24472
Kim, M. E. (2021). Shifting the lens: An implementation study of an innovative community-based and social network intervention to gender-based violence. Violence Against Women, 27(2), 222-254. doi:10.1177/1077801219889176
Jacobs, L. A., Kim, M. E., Whitfield, D. L., Gartner, R. E., Panichelli, M., Kattari, S. K., Downey, M. M., McQueen, S. S., & Mountz, S. E. (2021). Defund the police: Moving towards an anti-carceral social work. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 32(1), 37-62. doi.org/10.1080/10428232.2020.1852865
Kim, M. E. (2020). Transformative justice and restorative justice: Gender-based violence and alternative visions of justice in the United States. International Review of Victimology, 27(2), 162-172. doi:10.1177/0269758020970414.
Kim, M. E. (2020). Anti-carceral feminism: The contradictions of progress and the possibilities of counter-hegemonic struggle. Affilia, 35(3), 309-326. doi:10.1177/0886109919878276
Kim, M. E. (2020). The carceral creep: Gender-based violence, race and the expansion of the punitive state, 1973-1983. Social Problems, 67(2), 251-269. doi:10.1093/socpro/spz013
Kim, M. E. (2019). The culture-structure framework: Integrating culture, structure and categories of difference and power. The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 46(4), 5-25.
Kim, M. E., & Gallo, C. (2019). Victim compensation: A child of penal welfarism or carceral policies. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Kriminalvidenskab, 1/2019, 54-67.
Recent Publications (non-peer reviewed):
Kim, M. E., & Kanuha, K. V. (2022). Restorative justice and the dance with the devil. Affilia. Forthcoming.
Kim, M. E., Chung, M., Hassan, S.., & Ritchie, A. J. (2021). Defund the police – invest in community care: A guide to alternative mental health responses. Interrupting Criminalization. https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/non-police-crisis-response-…
Goodkind, S., Kim, M. E., Zelnick, J. R., Bay-Cheng, L. Y., Beltrán, R., Diaz, M., Gibson, M. F., Harrell, S., Kanuha, K., Moulding, N., Moutz, S., Sacks, T. K., Simon, B. L., Toft, J., & Walton, Q. L. (2021). Critical feminisms: Principles and practices for feminist inquiry in social work. Affilia, 36(4), 481-487.
Kim, M. E., Goodkind, S., & Zelnick, J. R. (2021). Critical feminist reflections on the Atlanta murders of March 16, 2021. Affilia, 36(3), 269-271.
Young, A., Goodkind, S., Zelnick, J. R., Kim, M. E., Harrell, S., & Toft, J. (2021). #IAmHer: Anjanette Young speaks truth to power. Affilia, 36(2), 129-139.
Kim, M. E. (2019). The coupling and decoupling of safety and crime control: An anti-violence movement timeline. In Stoever, J. (Ed.), The politicization of safety (pp. 15-37). New York: NYU Press.
