Dr. Peter Marina, a New Orleans native, is a PhD graduate of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and author of Down and Out in New Orleans: Transgressive Living in the Informal Economy (Columbia University Press, 2017), among other books.

As a sociologist and criminologist, Marina writes about new and emergent forms of transgression in our highly contradictory late-modern social world. His approach to sociology incorporates the striking dialectic of history and biography that allows him to penetrate and interact with a wide range of culturally diverse social groups around the world — from inner-city youths and street kids, to urban street performers and willful outsiders on the social fringes of the metropolis, to religiously inspired residents of the inner-city and urban occultists and Satanists, and most recently, to down and out urban dwellers — in a quest to make sense both empirically and theoretically of this rapidly changing, surprising but always fascinating world.

Marina created the first and only Human Rights Policing Certificate Program now offered to police officers, law enforcement agents, and criminal justice professionals throughout the United States. His online Human Rights Policing Program is offered through the Graduate and Extended learning Program at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. This program trains law enforcement agents how to apply human rights to policing. Law enforcement agents who complete the program receive a Certificate of Completion in Human Rights Policing. 

His upcoming book Human Rights Policing: Reimagining Law Enforcement in the 21st Century is now under contract with Routledge Press. 

Check out Down and Out in New Orleans: Transgressive Living in the Informal Economy (Columbia University Press) and Chasing Religion in the Caribbean: Ethnographic Journeys from Antigua to Trinidad (Palgrave Macmillan).

Areas of Concentration: Urban Sociology; Transgressive Criminology; Urban Ethnography; Travel & Tourism; Sociology of Religion; Hispanic Immigration; Delinquency & Youth Subculture

Current and Past Undergraduate and Graduate Courses Taught Social Problems; Sociological Foundations; Sociology of City Life; Juvenile Delinquency; Sociology of Deviance; Criminology; Qualitative Explorations (capstone); Urban Sociology; Sociology of Conflict; Current Issues in Anthropology; Power, Ideology, and Social Movements; Qualitative Methods in Social Research; Problems in Urban Community; Ethnic and Minority Relations; Sociological Writing (capstone); Masculinities; Women’s and Gender Studies; Independent Studies