Vera Institute of Justice

Yasser Arafat Payne, Phd. is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice and the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. Dr. Payne has organized a street ethnographic research program centered on exploring notions of resilience and resiliency with the streets of Black America using an unconventional methodological framework entitled Street Participatory Action Research (Street PAR). Street PAR is the process of doing research and activism with street-identified populations. Challenging the dominant arguments in the literature, Dr. Payne asserts that all members of the streets are in fact, resilient. His research program further focuses on Black racial identity, street identity, physical violence, as well as “gangster rap” music and culture.

Dr. Payne completed his doctoral work at the Graduate Center-City University of New York where he was trained as a social-personality psychologist. Dr. Payne also completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIH-NIDA) whereby he worked on a re-entry and intervention-based research project in New York City’s largest jail, Rikers Island.