Anna DalCortivo (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research reconceptualizes public safety by exploring how law, social movements, and community governance shape one another through everyday practices and collective action. Challenging approaches that treat socio-legal and social movement research as separate domains, Anna shows how communities build safety, accountability, and political life outside of formal legal systems, highlighting how these efforts reshape public safety on their own terms.

Her dissertation, Building the Square: Protest, Governance, and Abolitionist Safety at George Floyd Square, draws on five years of ethnographic research, fifty-nine interviews, archival materials, and visual analysis to explore how a protest site marking a police muder became civic infrastructure for care, accountability, and public safety outside formal institutions. She demonstrates how residents construct norms and sustain care, transforming public safety into a relational, community-driven achievement.

Her award-winning scholarship appears in Mobilization and Contexts, and her public writing in The Nation. At the University of Minnesota, she is an award-winning instructor recognized for her creative and engaged pedagogy.