Stephanie Quiring
Assistant Professor
Areas of Expertise
- CJ 431 Foundations of Criminological and Criminal Justice Theory
- CJ 312 The American Criminal Justice System
Highlighted Publications
- Quiring, S.Q., & Vlahos, J. (2026). Between care and control: A critical phenomenology of power, violence, and resistance in encounters between police and people living with serious mental illness [Manuscript under review]. College of Social Work, University of Kentucky.
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Todd, J., Quiring, S.Q., & Halbert, M. (2022). Effects on participant
knowledge, situational anxiety, and social distance attitudes following CIT training. Community Mental Health Journal. doi: 10.1007/s10597-022-00938-6 - Kim, H.W., Park, T., Quiring, S.Q., & Barrett, D. (2018). The anti-human trafficking collaboration model and serving victims: Providers’ perspectives on the impact and the experience. Journal of Evidence-Informed Social Work, 15(2), 185-202. doi: 10.1080/23761407.2018.1432433
Student & Research Availability
- Accepting Students in Programs: Bachelors | Doctoral | Masters
- Research or Interest Area Key Words: community-based mental health crisis response; peer recovery organizations; collective care and wellness; mental health law & policy; Crisis Intervention Teams; police; 4th and 5th amendment issues; state violence; power relationships; death penalty
Alma Mater
Howard University, JD Indiana University, PhD
Get to Know Stephanie
Dr. Stephanie Quiring is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Kentucky College of Social Work, where much of her work sits at the intersection of mental health, law, and the criminal legal system. She brings more than 15 years of experience as an advocate, educator, and attorney — grounding her scholarship in the realities of people whose lives have been shaped by the criminalization of mental illness and the contradictions of systems that govern their lives.
Her legal practice centered on criminal defense, with a focus on two intersecting realities: clients whose mental health crises gave rise to contact with the criminal legal system, and clients already system-involved who faced the compounding challenge of navigating legal proceedings while living with serious mental illness. That practitioner foundation continues to inform her research, which takes a translational approach — connecting critical scholarship to policy, practice, and systems change.
Before joining Kentucky, Dr. Quiring was on faculty at Indiana University and served as Research Director for the NAMI Indiana Technical Assistance Center for Mental Health and Justice, where her work supported the development of state-level infrastructure for community-based crisis response, including Sequential Intercept Model mapping across Indiana. She recently served as principal investigator on Investing in Recovery Communities: A Statewide Social Return on Investment Analysis, a study centering the lived experiences of people in recovery and the organizations supporting them. Building on this work, she is currently engaged in a related project with recovery communities across Ohio.
Her research, writing, and teaching span community-based mental health crisis response, peer support, recovery service organizations, mental health law and policy, and abolitionist feminist praxis. She is particularly interested in how power, state violence, and legal structures shape the conditions of collective wellness — and what it looks like to build responses outside of carceral logics.
Dr. Quiring holds a Juris Doctorate from Howard University School of Law and a PhD from Indiana University School of Social Work.