With artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Austin Edwards, and Perry Shaw
Moderated by Dr. Michael Mitchell, TCNJ Associate Professor, Departments of African American Studies and Criminology
Friday, October 17, 2025, 12:30-1:30 | AIMM 125

Please join us for a panel discussion inspired by the TCNJ Art Gallery’s exhibition, Futures Without Guns. The discussion will bring together three distinguished speakers, each of whom brings a unique and compelling perspective to the issues of gun violence, equity, and public health raised by the exhibition. The panel will be held on Friday, October 17 from 12:-30 to 1:30pm in AIMM 125, and is free and open to the public.

Speakers include Heather Dewey-Hagborg, an artist whose work in the Futures Without Guns exhibition, No Seconds, is a multi-channel installation created in collaboration with Amos Joseph Wells III, a convicted felon currently on death row in Texas; Austin Edwards, President of the Trenton NAACP, and Perry Shaw, Director of the Trenton Community Street Team. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Michael Mitchell, TCNJ Associate Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and Criminology. 

Participant Bios:

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a New York-based American/Canadian artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and PS1 MoMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, SFMoMA, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired.

Heather has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium, and is an affiliate of Data & Society. She is a founding board member of Digital DNA, a European Research Council funded project investigating the changing relationships between digital technologies, DNA and evidence.

Austin Edwards is a proud Trentonian born and raised in the City.  With humble beginnings in his childhood home on Rutherford Avenue and church home of Little Light True Gospel Church, he learned the value of caring for his community and its people, finding joy in helping address the issues facing neighbors, friends, family, and other community members.

His work experience includes positions at Capitol Hill, the United States Coast Guard, the Federal Judiciary, multiple federal agencies, and Ernst & Young. He returned to Trenton to work with the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office to reform police/community relations as well as state financial laws.  He works as legal and policy expert to build a more just and equitable New Jersey for all.  Austin holds a law degree from Howard University and a Masters of Domestic and Public Policy from Princeton University.

Austin actively volunteers with numerous organizations including the Howard University Alumni Club of Metropolitan Trenton (Go Bison!), Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc., Lambda Lambda Sigma Chapter, and the Trenton Urban League Guild. He is also a New Leaders Council and New Jersey LEAD graduate.  He serves as President of the local Trenton NAACP which uses its strong civil rights legacy in serving all of Mercer County to end poverty, improve housing stock, improve health outcomes, fight for a more environmentally just society, and return and restore our citizens back into the community, among many other bold and important  initiatives. He is most proud to provide scholarships to local kids to help them achieve their full academic potential, to create and celebrate diverse spaces for youth of all ages to excel, to produce life-changing alternatives to the school/drug/prison pipeline, and to illustrate to the community the young scholars we have in our very midst.   And this year he is running for re-election to his current school board seat to continue to use his time and talents to benefit the children and families in his community.

He specifically lives in Trenton on one of the big houses on the Bellevue Avenue hill that he always dreamed of living in while growing up on with his wife Natalie, his newborn Maya, and their greyhound Grace.  Finally, he loves to throw the best backyard BBQs!

Perry Shaw

Dr. Michael Mitchell is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies with a joint appointment in the Department of Criminology at The College of New Jersey. He holds a Ph.D. and a B.S. in Administration of Justice from Texas Southern University, as well as an M.A. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from The University of Texas at Arlington. Before entering academia, he worked as a detention service officer for the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department in Dallas, Texas. He was subsequently employed as a police officer with the Garland Police Department in Garland, Texas. As a professor and researcher, Dr. Mitchell’s teaching and academic research center on the lived experiences of individuals directly impacted by the criminal legal system and change-oriented practitioners who work within it. He is a criminologist by training, but an interdisciplinary scholar who engages a variety of audiences through speaking engagements and public-facing publications on race and policing in the United States, returning citizens and post-incarceration experiences, and youth justice issues, namely, the school-to-prison pipeline. Dr. Mitchell regularly teaches courses on policing, social justice, race, crime, and justice, as well as the school-to-prison pipeline and juvenile justice. In the broader community, he serves as a volunteer within the New Jersey judiciary. He has also served as a criminal defense expert witness in a California Racial Justice Act case.