Laura McTighe, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, comes to her research in North American Religions through twenty years of grassroots work to end state violence and advance community healing. Her dissertation, “’This Day, We Use Our Energy for Revolution’: Black Feminist Ethics of Survival, Struggle, and Renewal in the new New Orleans”, has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life. Her writings have been published in Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States (2012), the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry (2011), Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice (2009), and a variety of community publications. She is also the Co-Founder of the Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans, and serves as a Board Member to Men & Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago and Reconstruction, Inc. in Philadelphia.