We propel justice.
The Justice Propulsion Lab (JPL) is a research, policy, and practice center based at Fisk University that broadens how communities understand and address violence.
Rooted in the Southern Black Belt, JPL brings together students, scholars, institutions, policymakers, funders, and community partners to investigate violence in its many forms and move knowledge toward action.
At the center of the Lab’s work are Justice Propulsion Agents: students, scholars, practitioners, and community members who develop the knowledge, skills, confidence, and imagination to confront violence and help cultivate more peaceful and just systems.
Our Mission
To understand violence, produce agents who confront it, and cultivate peace, justice, and civil discourse through research, policy and practice.
Our Vision
A liberated Southern Black Belt and land where all people address the roots of violence and cultivate the conditions for eminent peace, justice and civil discourse.
Our Values
We meet people and communities with a compassion that recognizes their full humanity, honors their wounds, and remains committed to their peace and justice.
We understand liberation as collective work, built through trust, reciprocity, shared knowledge, and common purpose.
We widen the boundaries of belonging so that every voice, history, and lived experience can shape the work.
We refuse to accept the world only as it is and use creativity, research, and cultural memory to build what has not yet been realized.
We bring rigor, patience, accountability, and sustained attention to the long labor of building peace through justice and discourse.
We remain alive to transformation, willing to unsettle the definition of violence and what harms us, and ready to create new possibilities in its place.
Our Framework
What We Do:
VOICE: Expression, discourse, listening, speech, story, sound, civic participation, constitutional engagement, narrative and public communication.
VIOLENCE: Harm, conflict, punishment, degradation of sense-making, discipline, institutional relations, mediation, conflict transformation and the conditions that produce or interrupt violence.
VOCATION: Formation, leadership, purpose, professional pathways, public service, scholarship, institutional belonging and becoming.
How We Work:
RESEARCH: Inquiry, theory, evidence, measurement, evaluation, documentation and scholarship.
PRACTICE: Teaching, simulations, mediation, organizations, events, training, community engagement and applied interventions.
POLICY: Institutional systems, rules, governance, public-policy questions, recommendations, implementation and structural change.
Established in 2019,
at Fisk University
JPL brings students, scholars, and community partners together at Fisk University to understand violence and put knowledge into practice.
Primary Geographic Focus
The Southern Black Belt
JPL uses the Southern Black Belt as both geography and intellectual grounding: a place from which to study systems, histories, cultural memory, conflict, and the possibilities of liberation.
Expanding Reach
The American South
Broader Possibility
Blackened Communities across the United States and global diaspora.
Bring your time. Your talent.
Your treasure. Your questions.
JPL partners with institutions, communities, funders, researchers, educators, policymakers, and practitioners who believe that confronting violence requires more than one discipline, one sector, or one solution.