Roundtable: Epistemic Carcerality: Exploring the Intersections of Epistemic Injustice and the Carceral State

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract/Description

This roundtable session is composed of a series of interdisciplinary papers that draw on frameworks from the philosophical study of epistemic injustice, oppression, and resistance to explore the epistemic implications of contact with the carceral state. Drawing on lived experience and interview data with currently and formerly incarcerated individuals and paper authors, the papers collectively work to identify how system-involved individuals experience a wide array of epistemic exclusions that amount to epistemic oppression, and how this epistemic oppression in turn serves to sustain and perpetuate carcerality. We introduce the term epistemic carcerality to refer to this form of oppression endemic to the carceral state.

Sub Unit

• Area XIV. Roundtables

Individual Presentations

• The lived experience of all individuals matter: Considering an intersectional feminist, queer, and critical race criminological epistemic carcerality - Alison Cox, East Carolina University

• “An Idea of a Boundary”: The Dispossession of Knowledge in Illinois State Prisons - Erin Cheslow, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Epistemic Carcerality & Resistance in Higher Education - Nicole Lindahl-Ruiz, University of California, Berkeley; William Pierce, Education Justice Project

• The Epistemic Pains of Imprisonment for Incarcerated Transgender People - Alexis Rowland, University of California, Irvine; Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine

Chair

• Alexis Rowland, University of California, Irvine