The Criminalization Subcommittee will focus on the ways that carceral logic and ideological commitments to punishment have become a site for activist and academic resistance. It will address how cultural, legal, and militarized forms of policing work to discipline, violate, and characterize people through gendered racist notions of normativity, including the policing of specific bodies, places, (perceived) bodily movements/behaviors, and institutional sites
(e.g. school, office, prison, stage, playground). To radically confront “criminalization” is to deal with the lived, ongoing historical connections between domestic war, incarceration, and the still-unfolding logics of racial chattel and settler conquest/colonization.
Anti-State Violence And Anti-Mass Incarceration
Anti-State Violence And Anti-Mass Incarceration
The Criminalization Subcommittee will focus on the ways that carceral logic and ideological commitments to punishment have become a site for activist and academic resistance. It will address how cultural, legal, and militarized forms of policing work to discipline, violate, and characterize people through gendered racist notions of normativity, including the policing of specific bodies, places, (perceived) bodily movements/behaviors, and institutional sites
(e.g. school, office, prison, stage, playground). To radically confront “criminalization” is to deal with the lived, ongoing historical connections between domestic war, incarceration, and the still-unfolding logics of racial chattel and settler conquest/colonization.
Thus, our work will also respond to the interdisciplinary political analyses that are shaping local and national campaigns to halt prison expansion, interrupt deportation regimes, challenge state violence, and human service organizations. Informed by an abolitionist politic, the criminalization subcommittee with work on feminist, anti-colonialist, trans-positive, anti-capitalist projects that reverse the impact of the prison nation and build alternative social structures, communities and relationships. Intentional engagement with and leadership by people living inside prison and most affected by the carceral state will be a central feature of this subcommittee’s the work.
Team Members
Teaching and Learning Documents
Resources
