Michelle Fine (Graduate Center, CUNY) a “first generation” student who chaired the panel, noted three themes from Mort’s work that deeply influenced her work and the field: awakening a sense of justice, broadening the scope of justice, and imagining a just world.
Susan Opotow, another first generation student, described her work on moral inclusion and exclusion and cited two of Mort’s important contributions: the relationship between conflict processes and outcomes and the observation that conflict participants usually have “mixed motives”, both competitive and cooperative.
A student of Fine and Opotow’s, Maria Elena Torre, talked about her Critical Participatory Action Research that interrogated aggressive policing (“stop and frisk”) in the South Bronx.
She builds on Mort’s ideas about “awakening a sense of injustice” in those who are privileged and describes the “awakenings” of those who are experiencing aggressive policing in their neighborhood.
Finally, Andrew Cory Greene, a current Ph.D. student at CUNY, described his research on how students with previous criminal justice involvement are excluded from the scope of justice at colleges and universities based on a false conception of “safety.” Mort offered a few words, not about the past but about his current research, envisioning a just world through exploring the concept of a “global community.”