K-16 Collaboration Committee and Critical Prison Studies Caucus: The Carceral University II

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

This Critical Prison Studies panel features reflection upon the misery of mass incarceration and its extension into the university, built on first-hand experience. The panelists have all emerged from our experiences of state violence and its extrapolations into academic worlds with insight regarding the relationship of these two disciplinary institutions. We have also all devised creative and sustaining ways to resist. Baughman, finding the university doors closed, abandoned the academy and devoted himself to full-time organizing against the stigmas of mass incarceration for formerly-incarcerated people, particularly those criminalized by queer sexuality or other panic-provoking sexualities. Kilgore, joining the university in its precarious capacity as non-tenure-track adjunct labor, and then finding himself expelled in a public witchhunt, used his organizing experience to galvanize a national campaign for reinstatement to his teaching position. He was ultimately successful. Seigel, a student of mass incarceration, was involved in both of the other panelists’ fights and offers an academic reflection on the growth of criminal justice as an academic field wedded to police and carceral practice. Agid, an Assistant Professor who is also a long-time abolitionist activist and artist, focuses teaching and research on design, education, and building collaborative projects that seek to raise the possibility of and work toward prison industrial complex abolition by asking what conditions and strategies might make this work possible across institutions shaped by carceral logics and conditions. Kandaswamy is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies who explores relationships between social movements and state violence.

Together the panel members, with the audience, will consider the increased stigma attached to people with criminal convictions, the changing meaning of “terrorism” in the twenty-first century, the greatly expanded tolerance for the constriction of civil liberties including academic freedom, all of which exacerbate the challenges formerly-incarcerated people face to make a living, even (especially?) within university walls. They will also model resolute and courageous positions of refusal and resistance, revealing the power and the potential of the reinterpreted “criminal relationship,” the posture Fred Moten and Stephano Harney have called “the only possible relation to the university today.” Panelists will speak to the position of education and the university in relationship to the persistence, on the one hand, or end, on the other, of systems of confinement and control.

Both this session and its companion, “The Carceral University,” take as their point of departure the premise that to engage in a critical university studies project requires rendering critical the carceral regime whose attendant elements (policing, confinement, parole, surveillance, state repression, etc.) interface with the theory and praxis of universities as normative sites of U.S. national subject formation.

Because two of the members of this panel are formerly incarcerated and released fewer than ten years ago, they will be prohibited from travelling to Toronto by Canadian immigration laws. Some part of this panel may therefore need to be conducted telephonically and/or through pre-recorded video.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• To Be Announced, NA

Individual Presentations

• After Penn State: Sex Panics in the Carceral University - Galen Baughman, Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants- CURE (DC)

• Should A "Felon" Be Able to Teach our Children? The Case of James Kilgore and the University of Illinois - James Kilgore, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL)

• Criminology and the Carceral U: The Growth of Criminal Justice as an Academic Field - Micol Seigel, Indiana University-Bloomington (IN)

Comment

• Shana Agid, New School University (NY)