Robert J. Durán

Dr. Robert J. Durán, grew up in Utah and is a Chicano author, researcher, professor, and community advocate who studies gangs and police shootings in Colorado, New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. After working eight years along the U.S.-Mexico border at New Mexico State University (2006-2014), he moved to Knoxville to join the University of Tennessee (2014-2018). After four years, he returned back to the contested Southwest/South as an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University (2018-present). He was promoted to Full Professor in 2026. Currently, he is developing various research comparisons between marginalized experiences of gangs, policing, neighborhoods, and juvenile justice between the Southwest (primarily White and Mexican-American) and the South (primarily White and Black).

Dr. Durán's research concerns racism in the post-civil rights era and community resistance, from gang evolution and border surveillance to disproportionate minority contact and officer involved shootings. His work and efforts in the community have received numerous acknowledgments including being awarded the 2005 Racial/Ethnic Minority Graduate Scholarly Activism Award by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the recipient of the 2010 Hispanic Faculty and Staff Caucus Junior Faculty of the Year Award and the 2011 New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology Division on People of Color and Crime. He has received teaching awards at the University of Colorado and New Mexico State University wherein criminal justice students voted him to be the 2012-2013 Faculty Member of the Year. His 2013 book, Gang Life in Two Cities, received an Honorable Mention and his 2019 book, The Gang Paradox, received the Association of Humanist Sociology Book Award. In 2019, Dr. Durán also received the Coramae Richey Mann Award for outstanding contributions of scholarship on race, ethnicity, crime, and justice by the American Society of Criminology Division on People of Color and Crime.

Dr. Durán previously worked for child and family services, youth corrections, and juvenile probation. His interest in community advocacy was shaped by growing up in a working-class family where he witnessed various levels of community inequalities based on race and ethnicity, class, gender, and religion. As a teenager, his gang involvement and penitentiary chances offered little opportunity for mainstream success. Institutions of higher education opened new doors for learning, organizing, and training to conduct research in order to assist marginalized groups and communities toward social justice.