Criminal Justice Professor Rousseau Wins BU Grant to Investigate Resilience in At-Risk Communities
Criminal justice is about more than just arrests and investigations. The applied social science also encompasses finding scalable solutions to the causes of crime, as well as reckoning with the roots of criminality, the traumatic legacies that crime and violence can leave behind, and the perseverance that sustains those in its wake.
It is in this latter arena that Metropolitan College Associate Professor Danielle Rousseau finds her expertise. Her research centers trauma, justice, mental health, and resilience. And now, thanks to a grant awarded by the BU Center for Innovation in Social Sciences (CISS), Dr. Rousseau will advance her research further as she investigates strategies to measure strength and resilience in at-risk communities being supported by programs that aim to mitigate violence through intervention.
“So much of our attention in prevention work with urban youth is focused on risk,” Dr. Rousseau says. “But what if we also focused on the strengths of our youth and of the urban communities in which they live?”
Here, Dr. Rousseau will do just that, joined by a team of undergraduate student researchers funded by the CISS grant. She was one of 23 grantees for the summer round of the competitive BU internal grant, which aims to foster new research or enhance ongoing projects among faculty, full-time lecturers, and graduate students.
Through the use of a strengths-focused, empathic approach, the research funded by the CISS grant will help to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of resilience of youth in cities. Its findings will translate to informed means to advance prevention, intervention, and holistic wellbeing.
Learn more about the MS in Criminal Justice at BU MET.