Speakers

William Ming Liu, PhD., is Professor of Counseling Psychology and Department Chair at the University of Maryland. His research interests are in social class and classism, men and masculinity, and White supremacy and privilege. He has received leadership awards from the Committee on Socioeconomic Status (APA), The Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race (Division 45 of APA), and the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities (Division 51 of APA). He is an editor of the Handbook of Multicultural Competencies in Counseling and Psychology (Sage, 2003), an editor of Culturally Responsive Counseling with Asian American Men (2010, Routledge), the author of Social Class and Classism in the Helping Professions: Research, Theory, and Practice (2011, Sage), and the editor of the Handbook of Social Class in Counseling (2013, Oxford University Press). He is co-author of Psychology and the Social Class Worldview (2022, Routledge). He is also co-authoring a forthcoming book titled Systems of White Supremacy and White Privilege: A Racial-Spatial Framework for Psychology from Oxford University Press. He is the past-Editor for the journal, the Psychology of Men and Masculinities. Additionally, he is a fellow of Division 17 and 51 in APA.

Derecka Purnell is a lawyer, writer, organizer, and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. She works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and trainings in community based organizations through an abolitionist framework.

As a Skadden Fellow, she helped to build the Justice Project at Advancement Project’s National Office which focused on consent decrees, police and prosecutor accountability, and jail closures, providing community training, political education and legal representation to organizers. Her advocacy efforts led to the dismissal of over 3,000 cases based on unconstitutional policing practices. Additionally, she supports several campaigns and grassroots organizations around the criminal legal system, electoral justice, and community investment, including Action St. Louis, Dream Defenders, Communities Against Police Crimes and Repression, the Ferguson Collaborative, and the Movement for Black Lives. Derecka also organized the founding steering committee for Law for Black Lives, a growing network of 5,000 law students, lawyers, and legal workers to support social movements.  

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Derecka co-created the COVID19 Policing Project at the Community Resource Hub for Safety Accountability. The project tracks police arrests, harassment, citations and other enforcement through public health orders related to the pandemic. 

Derecka received her JD from Harvard Law School, her BA from the University of Missouri- Kansas City, and studied public policy and economics at the University of California- Berkeley as a Public Policy and International Affairs Law Fellow. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, The Appeal, Truthout, Slate, Boston Review, Huffington Post, Vox, and In These Times. She’s been on NPR, Democracy Now!, Slate’s What Next, and MSNBC, and is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. Derecka has lectured, studied, and strategized around social movements across the United States, The Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia. 

Derecka is from St. Louis and lives between the DMV and New York City.