Incarceration

States of Incarceration: Historicizing the Incarceration of Native People in the Upper Midwest

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.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins: Deformalism: Fermentation, Abstraction, and the Affective Organization of Racial Carcerality

Putting Winsor McCay's iconic comic strip The Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend into conversation with the federal government's reorganization of consumable goods into toxic, intoxicating and medicinal substances at the turn of the twentieth century, this talk reconsiders the narrative of progressive-era governmental benevolence - in particular the Food and Drug Act of 1906 - to consider where and how affective form and materiality became aligned with the racialized carcerality.