The States of Incarceration project of the Humanities Action Lab challenges students, scholars, and organizers all over the country to explore local histories of mass incarceration in the interest of collectively understanding ho wthe United States became the world's leading incarcerator. The project uses place-based public and digital humanities, history, memory, and storytelling to help shape the current national dialogue on criminal justice.

In the song “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, the settlement of the Americas is framed through liberal understandings of arrival that transform chattel slavery and forced labor into the exceptional narratives of pulling oneself up from hard labor to freedom. It reflects current political mobilizations against xenophobia and immigration bans that insist that we are all immigrants to the Americas. And it erases completely the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands.