Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures “Made Local” – Alec Karakatsanis

Register to attendIN-PERSON. A recording will be made available after the lecture on thePittsburgh Arts & Lectures YouTube channel.From the prizewinning rising legal star, the deeply researched and definitive book on the way the media and police distract us from what mattersJoin Alec Karakatsanis for a discussion of how we can think about copaganda in 2026, including the role of civil rights law and propaganda in times of rising authoritarianism, as well as how civil rights lawyers and communities can use the arts, storytelling, and narrative to resist and build human connection.“Copaganda” is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why.Pittsburgh native Alec Karakatsanis is the Founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps.  He has pioneered constitutional civil rights cases to challenge the size, power, profit, and everyday brutality of the punishment bureaucracy across the United States. He is a graduate from Yale College with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and Harvard Law School, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a public defender representing impoverished people accused of crimes in Alabama and Washington, D.C. Among other awards, Alec was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice and received the prestigious 2023 New Frontier Award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.He is the author of two books and also writesAlec’s Copaganda Newsletter. Alec likes playing the piano and soccer, collecting rocks, singing, growing flowers, creating mosaics from dried flowers, repeating the same jok