Emily Gaarder

biography type
Director

Dr. Emily Gaarder (she/her/hers) is the Director of the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota Duluth and an Associate Professor in the Department of Studies in Justice, Culture, and Social Change at UMD.

Since 2003, Emily has taught restorative justice at the university level and also for community groups and organizations. She loves to share how restorative justice can be used in daily life by everyone. She has trained hundreds of volunteers in the circle process, circle keeping, and restorative dialogue.

She has published widely on restorative justice and specializes in issues of gender. She helped establish the Domestic Violence Restorative Circles Program in Duluth, Minnesota, one of the only programs of its kind in the U.S. that specifically works with cases of intimate partner abuse. Her current research focuses on an evaluation of the program (with Dr. Scott Vollum). Read a sample of her research here.

Emily first learned about the power of restorative justice while working with girls in the juvenile justice system. She has also worked in victim services and has led restorative dialogues and circles with juvenile probation programs, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office of Victim-Offender Mediation, civil mediation units, and the innovative juvenile and adult restorative programs of Men as Peacemakers. She earned her Ph.D. in Justice Studies from Arizona State University, her M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University of Cincinnati, and her B.A. from the University of Minnesota-Morris.

View Emily's website

View Emily's CV 

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