Decarceral Futures: Dismantling Carceral Architectures in the Late-Stage American Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel explores how carceral logic is a defining feature of the late-stage American empire, shaping one's ability to move through society and resist oppressive systems and the geographies through which we navigate it outside of the prison space. Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies—including critical race theory, speculative fiction, carceral studies, and literacy storytelling—our panelists are situated at the intersections of incarceration, forced migration, disability and the humanities, with inquiries to contest the violent logics of policing, containment, and exclusion.

Prisons have long served as sites of liberation and control in which literacy, the humanities, and education more broadly become both a pathway and a barrier that impacts individuals long after prison. How does one reclaim agency in the face of the lingering limitations of carceral punishment? In what ways can those impacted by the criminal legal system reclaim education as a tool for liberation, challenging the mythologies of empire that sustain carceral systems? How do ableist logics further compromise one's ability to move across different spaces? And how can speculative fiction, a literary tradition focused on a decolonial future, serve as a method for imagining alternative systems of care beyond police and state-sanctioned violence?

The forced (im)mobility of racialized Others—whether through incarceration, border enforcement, or state surveillance—demonstrates how carceral geographies function as tools of colonial violence. Examining how policing, forced migration, and containment operate as interdependent mechanisms of white supremacy, this panel interrogates how national sovereignty is performed through carceral spaces, transforming entire landscapes into sites of exclusion and racialized control.

We are a panel of scholars who are united in the conviction that prison isn’t simply a singular place, but rather a moving matrix of carceral logic that embeds itself into various sites of confinement in the American empire, from schools to residential homes to national borders and beyond it. Carcerality is a product of the human imagination. Our scholarship and lived experience demonstrate that in order to realize a future without prisons or police, we must first come to understand as a society how the colonial legacies of national sovereignty and the Transatlantic slave trade system has fostered a regulatory mechanism within the American psyche towards all those categorized as Other. The architectures of the prison system branch themselves into institutions charged with the care of society’s most vulnerable populations such as schools and hospitals where they operate as invisible cages, as pipelines. Our work illuminates that prison isn’t simply a place which confines the body, but more so a phenomena which confines the soul. Many Americans ask, what would a world without police look like? Our panel argues, let’s imagine it. We suggest radical tools to disavow the public imagination of carceral logic through speculative worldbuilding and digital humanities which breaks down barriers between public fear in regards to a world without prisons and police. It is our hope, as a panel, that our collective vision and tools of liberatory practice for a decolonized future can be actualized if only we simply try.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Education, Incarceration, and Resistance: The Legacy of American Empire Through Cultural and Racial Inequities - OLATUNJI Joseph EGUNGBEMI, University of Wyoming

• Halfway Home to a Decarceral Future: Speculative Explorations of Radical Mental Healthcare - Jumi Bello, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

• What Good is Literacy and the Humanities After Prison? - Patrick W. Berry, Syracuse University

• Performance of National Sovereignty: Forced (Im)Mobility of Racialized Others in Contemporary and Historical Carceral Spaces - Stephanie Kaczynski, University of North Carolina at Chapel H

Chair

• Marcia Watson-Vandiver, Towson University

Biographical Information

Olatunji Joseph Egungbemi is a Nigerian academic and educator currently a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Wyoming. He is trained in Politics and International Relations from Obafemi Awolowo University and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and recognizes the necessity of cross-ethnics in research. His work interrogates the intersections of race, education, and incarceration, with an emphasis on the ways that the legacies of slavery and colonialism continue to shape contemporary systems of oppression and resistance.
Egungbemi’s academic interests are based on both theory and practice. His work as an educator has included teaching Global Perspectives and History to Cambridge A-Level and IGCSE students and encouraging students to think critically about issues of justice, equity, and narratives in history. Through the "Books for Inmates" initiative, he promotes literacy and educational access in Nigeria for incarcerated individuals. These life experiences inform his dedication to exploring the liberatory work that education can be in the process of resisting and liberation.
Egungbemi’s current research uses critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and carceral studies to critique the prison-industrial complex as a site of cultural erasure and production. Grounded in his Nigerian identity, he provides comparative and transnational perspectives on their common struggles against imperial and carceral systems. His scholarship illustrates the value of employing decolonial frameworks to address and dismantle systems of racial and social inequity in society, while also imagining pathways to justice and social transformation.

Jumi Bello is a mad black English Literature PhD candidate at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas whose work centers madness, race and the future. Her research interests include contemporary American literature, critical disability studies, speculative fiction, carceral studies and decolonial theory, however her true love is mad studies.

A fiction graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Jumi’s writing and research has been supported by the Black Mountain Institute, Tin House, Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, Roots Wounds Words, StoryStudioChicago, the Kenyon Review, the Center for Black Literature, the Science Fiction Research Association, the University of Buffalo and University of California, Riverside. Jumi is currently developing her creative doctoral dissertation into a literary speculative novel about radical mental healthcare, disability justice and black resistance. She calls it a novel of dark disabled futures.

Patrick W. Berry is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. His research includes the award-winning born-digital Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times (2012, with Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, Utah State University Press/Computers and Composition Digital Press) and the award-winning Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison (2018, Southern Illinois University Press). His current project is a born-digital monograph that offers a much-needed analysis of the support available to those impacted by the criminal legal system and the potential role that literacy and the humanities can play in helping this population rebuild their lives.

He completed his doctoral work in the Center for Writing Studies and Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level includes courses in composition, rhetoric and ethics, professional writing, magazine production, and digital media composing in diverse classrooms, including a medium-high security prison. He is currently director of Project Mend, an initiative that focuses on writing and publishing as a means by which formerly incarcerated individuals and their families can reimagine themselves, their communities, and their future. Project Mend (projectmend.net) is a digital storytelling initiative featuring the work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their families. It consists a community-based digital storytelling and publishing initiative for formerly incarcerated people and their families in Syracuse, New York, that blends humanities-based programming with training in media production and the open-source publication Mend, which features print and digital narratives of anyone impacted by the criminal justice system, including family members of the incarcerated.

Stephanie Kaczynski (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Stephanie is an interdisciplinary communication scholar studying community-organized resistance to police racism. She engages urban history, critical media studies, cultural studies, and performance studies to center the people made most vulnerable by colonial systems of power. Her current project, George Floyd Square: Resistance, Forced Migration, and Policing employs critical performance ethnography across mediated, archival, and physical sites of analysis to examine how George Floyd Square emerged from the particular local history of resistance to racialized urban policies in South Minneapolis. Her next project, Resistance Through Occupation: Decolonial Negotiation of Third Spaces, explores the creation, removal, negotiation, and policing of third spaces in U.S. cities and examines how creative occupation of third spaces can inform a decolonial politics.

Stephanie’s research is driven by engaged work with a wide range of nonprofits, coalitions, and community-led organizations. Her engaged work informs her theoretical scholarship as well as her approach to empowering students to enact their own agency within systems of power. For three years, Stephanie has taught communication courses for incarcerated students in North Carolina through UNC’s Correctional Education Program, learning from and dialoguing with students impacted by the prison-industrial complex. Working within the institutional constraints of the carceral system, Stephanie employs a variety of teaching techniques to help students engage their own agency, explore topics that matter to them, and theorize upon their experiences within the carceral space. Stephanie’s implementation of performance workshops, peer feedback processes, small group work, and structured discussions help to build a classroom community within a space that discourages risk, disclosure, and connection. Students have reported these courses to be both empowering and transformative, both academically and personally.

Stephanie also holds a Master of Arts in Communication and Media from DePaul University, an Advanced Graduate Certificate in American Studies from Northwestern University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Communication and Journalism from the University of St. Thomas.