Dr. Taylor Reed-Jones Using Self-Originated Theory to Inspire and Drive Practice

Dr. Taylor Reed-Jones, who joined the College of Social Work in August 2025, is already taking a seat at tables where social workers have not always been represented.

Interdisciplinary gatherings over a common goal

Over this past summer, Dr. Reed-Jones participated in the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network (RDCJN) Summer Research Institute at the University of Maryland. The main purpose of RDCJN, originally founded at The Ohio State University by Drs. Ruth D. Peterson and Lauren Krivo, is to “advance knowledge about the intersection of race, crime and justice.”

The institute seeks to “produce a body of rigorous and original work on how these dynamics impact the struggle for racial democracy, that is, the full inclusion of all (racialized) groups in the rights of citizenship.”

Dr. Reed-Jones was there to develop a new theoretical framework.

This institute aligned closely with Dr. Reed-Jones’ specialization in examining structural racism and trauma embedded in the collateral consequences of incarceration for Black young adults. Grounded in a life course perspective, her work explores the intersections of inequality, reentry and violence, with a focus on how policies and structural conditions shape life trajectories. 

Creation of her theory

With her mentor, Dr. Christopher Uggen, and reviewer, Dr. Daniel Brisson, Dr. Reed-Jones developed an original theory titled Racialized Carceral-Housing Nexus Framework, which focuses on the mutually reinforcing relationship between housing governance and the carceral state, and how racialization shapes both systems to produce spatial exclusion, surveillance and criminal legal system contact.

Dr. Reed-Jones was the only social work professional in her cohort, reflecting the relatively limited representation of social workers in the network compared with scholars from fields such as sociology and criminology.

Dr. Reed-Jones hopes to inspire more of those in the field of social work to be involved with the RDCJN. Typically, fields of criminology or sociology are big players at these institutes, but Dr. Reed-Jones is confident that social workers can continue to bring another useful perspective to the conversation. “There is more than one way to solve a problem, so having the collective of disciplines was helpful,” Dr. Reed-Jones says. “I was able to expand my thinking particularly considering areas of scholarship that previously was not considered within my work and connect with people outside of my discipline all working towards a similar goal: to help people who are disproportionately impacted by the criminal legal system. They are working on this goal in different ways and there was a lot that I learned from them.”

Theory in social work

Many of the dominant theories used in social work research originated in disciplines outside of social work. For Dr. Reed-Jones, this makes interdisciplinary engagement especially important—not only for bringing social work perspectives into other fields, but also for ensuring that social work scholarship can speak to broader academic conversations.

“Social workers often approach structural and societal issues through a helping lens,” Dr. Reed-Jones explains. “We may already recognize the existence of social injustices—such as inequities in access to structural resources or racial bias within criminal legal practices—and therefore focus much of our attention on addressing those inequities. In other disciplines, however, establishing and explaining how those inequities operate may remain an important part of the research process. As social work researchers continue to engage in interdisciplinary scholarship, we should consider how our work translates across fields.”

Developing the Racialized Carceral-Housing Nexus Framework with this interdisciplinary audience in mind allows Dr. Reed-Jones to extend its relevance beyond social work and provide a framework that scholars across disciplines can use to examine housing, criminal legal system involvement and racialized surveillance. “My hope for the framework is it can be used across disciplines when looking at housing, and people in the criminal legal system, or in neighborhoods who are hyper surveilled.”

She also emphasizes the importance of looking beyond the past few decades to understand how present-day inequities developed. Many contemporary policies, she explains, are rooted in laws and practices established hundreds of years ago that continue to shape institutions and disproportionately affect marginalized communities and identities.

She hopes the theory will encourage social workers and scholars across disciplines to think more critically about the origins of the policies and systems they encounter in their work. Dr. Reed-Jones shares, “I’m excited to continue developing my paper and refining the framework as I move it toward publication and consider where this interdisciplinary work can make the strongest contribution.