Vivian Swayne is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned her PhD in 2024. Her scholarship focuses on visual culture, policing, housing insecurity, community safety, and alternatives to criminalization.

Swayne’s dissertation traced how murals around the world both reproduce and contest police power, and in 2024, Swayne participated in the Visualizing Abolition Dissertation Workshop at UC Santa Cruz. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in Critical Criminology, the Journal of Law and Political Economy, Feminist Formations, Punishment & Society, and the Appalachian Journal, among others. Her forthcoming work includes invited chapters on cultural organizing and anti-carceral practice in Appalachia. Swayne’s experience in mixed methods research includes multimodal critical discourse analysis, focus groups, interviewing, and survey design, with data analysis experience in NVivo, Dedoose, Qualtrics, and R.

As Co-Director of Abolition Now: Images for Study and Struggle, Swayne leads an open-source archive that documents social movement art created by and for communities impacted by mass incarceration and state violence. She has presented Abolition Now at the International Visual Sociology Association’s annual meeting in Xalapa, Mexico and at the Appalachian Studies Association. She has also designed and led applied research initiatives at the Appalachian Justice Research Center, coordinating projects with student researchers and community partners. In collaboration with the NAACP and local grassroots organizations, Swayne’s community-based research includes investigating police calls for service, the role of police in schools in Knoxville, and police violence in Central Appalachia.

Swayne served as Newsletter Editor for the American Sociological Association’s Section on Sex and Gender from 2019 to 2024 and as a Housing and Sexuality Research Fellow at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Before and during her graduate studies, she worked for seven years as a residential and transitional housing counselor at the Helen Ross McNabb Center, supporting people experiencing housing insecurity, substance use, and mental health crises. She is certified in Restorative Practices and Trauma-Informed Community De-Escalation. Swayne is an experienced graphic note taker at community safety convenings, a mixed media visual artist, and a local musician.