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After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Music Industry Management from Wayne State University, Dr. Brooks earned a J.D. from the University of Detroit Law School where he earned four Book Awards, served on the Law Review, and graduated third in his class. He went on to practice at large corporate law firms in Detroit and San Francisco, and at the United States Justice Department and a boutique bankruptcy firm, both in Los Angeles.
He returned to school, earning a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University Los Angeles and a doctorate in Sociology: Justice from American University. His dissertation focused on the evolution of state laws regarding involuntary civil commitment.
Dr. Brooks has taught in the Criminal Justice Department at WSU since Fall of 2004, and is currently a full Professor. He has served as Chair of that department and has contributed to many campus-wide committees. He was co-creator and initial Director of the Theme Semester, and, since 2015, has served as Chair of WSU’s Institutional Review Board, which is tasked with ensuring ethical compliance in all research involving human subjects. He also recently served as Acting Chair of the newly-formed Interdisciplinary Studies Department.
Dr. Brooks is a notably-eclectic teacher and researcher. He has taught twenty-six catalog courses and eight Special Topics courses in the Criminal Justice Department; his teaching currently focuses on several areas including addictions counseling, forensic mental health, law-related courses, and sociologically-informed ones such as Crime and the Media.
Much of Dr. Brooks’ research is qualitative, and far-flung. For instance, he has conducted content analyses of representations of alcohol use in the daily comics, depictions of LGBTQ issues in criminal justice textbooks, the construction of gender in infant clothing through text and image, and news media constructions of bullying over a nearly thirty-year period. He is equally at ease co-authoring book chapters on contemplative pedagogies in graphic design education and the ethics of the Supreme Court case Brewer v. Williams.
Dr. Brooks has published three books to date. The first, “Cheaper by the Hour,” was published by Temple University Press in 2011, and is an ethnographic account of his and others’ experiences working as temporary attorneys in Washington, D.C. The second book, co-authored with Dr. Jeffrey Cohen of the University of Washington Tacoma, is titled “Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem,” and was published by Lynne Rienner Press in 2014. It is rooted in social constructionist thought. The most recent book, “Criminology Explains School Bullying,” also co-authored with Dr. Cohen, was published in September 2020 by the University of California Press. That book is one volume in the “Criminology Explains …” series, of which Dr. Cohen and Dr. Brooks are series editors. Dr. Brooks has also authored or co-authored five published and forthcoming book chapters and several peer-reviewed articles. Additionally, he has presented or co-presented nearly four dozen papers at various regional, national, and international conferences since beginning his doctoral studies.
