Bridget Conley

Bridget Conley is Research Director at the World Peace Foundation (WPF) at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She leads WPF’s research programs on atrocity response and mass incarceration, and hosts WPF’s podcast, Disrupting Peace. She works with the Executive Director on project development, fundraising and strategic vision for WPF. Currently, her primary research focus concerns the implications of American mass incarceration for local, national and international policies. She has published on starvation crimes, the 1992 – 1995 war in Bosnia, mass atrocities and genocide, and memorializing violence. Her latest book, COVID Diagnosed the System: Lessons from the Pandemic in Massachusetts’ Prisons, will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2026.

“RJ introduces practices to match with the ethics and ideas that inspire me in research, including feminist and participatory action research methodologies. An RJ approach intentionally slows the pace of the “planned” encounter (an interview script), allowing for a more honest engagement. Especially when someone is interviewing about traumatic or difficult experiences, slowing down, paying attention to breathing and encountering each other as humans, means foregrounding care for the exchange, rather than asserting privilege or hierarchy. The interview is no longer the production of raw material, but an encounter that is meaningful in its right.”