The Center of Global Culture and Communication (An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication)
& the Northwestern University Department of Philosophy

jointly present

Resisting Prison Injustice

featuring

Lisa Guenther

(Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies,
Queen’s University)

For as long as prisons have existed, people in prison have resisted carceral power.  This workshop reflects on two very different examples of prisoner resistance: the California Prison Hunger Strikes of 2011-2013, and a current movement to create a memorial garden at the former Prison for Women in Kingston, Canada.  While resistance to prison injustice takes many different forms, it also raises some common questions: How do people in situations of extreme isolation and control connect across systemic barriers to organize collective resistance?  What role do memory, imagination, and affect play in resisting carceral logics?  And how are networks of solidarity sustained across the prison walls?

Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015). From 2012-17, she facilitated a discussion group with men on death row in Tennessee called REACH Coalition, and she is a member of the P4W Memorial Collective Advisory Board.  She is currently working on a critical phenomenology of prison abolition and decolonization on Turtle Island.

Respondents
Corey Barnes (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University)
Sooraj Saksena (Doctoral Student of Philosophy, Northwestern University)

ON ZOOM,
Thursday, February 9
1:00 pm to 2:30 pm CST