Date: February 25, 2014
Time: 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Location: University of Victoria, ECS 108
Abstract:
This talk will briefly outline the unprecedented scale of incarceration in the US today and then describe two efforts to disseminate the work of prison writers bearing witness to conditions inside the US prison complex: Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America (Michigan State UP, 2014), and The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), a Hamilton Digital Humanities Initiative project. Legal scholar Jonathan Simon has observed that Foucault's Discipline and Punish introduced humanists to the prison as a viable subject of study in the very years that the US prison was growing to a scale seemingly incomprehensible except to the statistical analyses associated with the social sciences. This talk will describe and open discussion of traditional, book-based and digital efforts to bring humanists back into critical engagement with prison studies and scholarship by directly engaging our disciplinary training with prison narrative on a traditional and on a global digital platform. Fourth City offers scholars, students, policy makes, activists, imprisoned people, their families, and the public the largest sampling to date of first person, non-fiction witness to conditions inside the US prison complex. The APWA is intended not only as a comprehensive archive of one of the largest witness literatures in the history of the world; it will create a venue wherein humanists around the world can join with and offer their singular skills to multi- and inter-disciplinary efforts to understand and begin to dismantle the world's leading prison regime.
Bio:
Doran Larson is Professor of English at Hamilton College. He has led The Attica Writer's Workshop since 2006. He is the founder of the Attica-Genesee Teaching Project, which began delivering college-credit courses inside Attica in January 2011. He has recently organized a post-secondary prison education program at Mohawk Correctional Facility. Larson's essays on prison writing, prison teaching, and related issues have appeared in Salmagundi, College Literature, English Language Notes, Radical Teacher, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The (on-line) Atlantic Monthly. He is the editor of "The Beautiful Prison," a special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (UK) in which incarcerated people, prison teachers and critics imagine what the U.S prison would look like if transformed into a constructive institution. Professor Larson has also published two novels, a novella, and over a dozen short stories, in addition to critical essays on American literature and film.
