Our Students: Sade Lindsay

Sadé Lindsay has persevered through trials few her age have ever known. While lining up for the procession into Ohio Stadium for graduation in 2015, Lindsay got a phone call. Her brother had been killed in a car accident. Within a month of starting her journey as a graduate student, her father lost his battle with cancer.

Despite these tragic losses, Lindsay continues to prevail. Since her career as a graduate student began, she has been selected by the American Society of Criminology for a Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship for Racial and Ethnic Diversity and by Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences for its Graduate Student Award for Distinguished Service. Lindsay’s research on racial inequities in media coverage of the opioid and crack epidemics garnered her honorable mentions from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. As judged by her faculty mentors and peers alike, Lindsay has tremendous potential to become a leading scholar in the field of criminology.

A Columbus native, Lindsay attended Eastmoor Academy, where she excelled in academics and athletics; as a junior, she was selected to The Columbus Dispatch All-League Girls Basketball team. Her discipline and determination earned her an academic scholarship to Ohio State, which worked out just fine for the avid Buckeye fan.

“I have an extreme love for all things Buckeyes,” she said. “My mom went to Ohio State, and growing up in Columbus, you’re all about Buckeye pride.”

As an undergraduate, Lindsay discovered her passion for criminology when she took a criminal justice course taught by senior lecturer Deborah Wilson.

“I loved the course,” said Lindsay. “I loved learning about legal cases, and my instructor was so inspiring that I started taking as many sociology classes as I could.”

Lindsay eventually switched her major to criminology and began formulating ideas for a series of research projects, one of which would become her master’s thesis.

When she graduated with her BA in criminology, the opioid epidemic was just beginning to emerge onto the public scene. Lindsay had been following the news as the crisis unfolded and began to question whether race played a role in how the media and public responded to the opioid crisis as opposed to how they responded to the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s.

“Looking at just the media, I found significant differences in how the epidemics were reported,” said Lindsay. “Cocaine was treated as a public safety issue demanding aggressive police responses whereas opioid use has been framed as a public health issue, requiring a therapeutic approach.”

Lindsay’s research revealed the extent to which press coverage would humanize opioid users but demonize or otherwise dismiss crack cocaine users as criminals. “The state’s response to the heroin epidemic has been far less punitive than the crack epidemic; whereas during the crack crisis, the state and federal government focused much more on policing and incarcerating,” Lindsay said.

According to Ryan King, professor of sociology who served on Lindsay’s master’s thesis committee, Lindsay has an extraordinary work ethic and ability to envision new and compelling research questions that connect multiple areas of the discipline.

“Sadé Lindsay performed brilliantly in my graduate seminar,” King said. “It is precisely this quality — grit and willingness to put in the necessary hours on a project — that separates students who succeed from those who falter during graduate school.”

Lindsay’s adeptness at developing independent research ideas is further demonstrated by her work with fellow graduate students. In a project that has already won both external and internal graduate student paper awards and was recently published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Lindsay and two graduate student peers in her cohort analyzed how mass shootings are covered in the media depending on the race of the perpetrator. The paper demonstrates how white shooters are medicalized, while black shooters are criminalized.

“Sadé is developing a coherent research trajectory on cultural representations of race and its implications for racial inequality and public policy,” said Michael Vuolo, associate professor and Lindsay’s faculty advisor. “I believe wholeheartedly in the importance of her research to further both her own career as well as address longstanding issues in social inequality.”

In addition to showing tremendous intellectual maturity and diligence, Lindsay is a tireless advocate for underrepresented groups on campus and in her community. For several years, she has been volunteering weekends as a mentor to the young men incarcerated at the Circleville Juvenile Correction Facility in hopes of breaking the cycle of criminal recidivism.

“They remind me of my cousins and brother,” she said. “I don’t look at them any differently than many of the people I grew up with — they need guidance and support.”