RESEARCH IN THE AMERICAN RUST BELT
Abolitionism, Race, and Class
Since 2017, I have studied how modern technology intersects with abolitionism and community policing in the U.S. “Rust Belt”. I have worked with community activists and the formerly incarcerated while participating in dozens of “defund the police” protests in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Part of this research includes an investigation of how police carried out covert social media and drone surveillance during 2020 protests. I also received approval from the Wisconsin Department of Corrections to carry out an ethnographically informed user experience or UX research project concerning digital technology in prison classrooms. An immediate aim of this research is to produce a scholarly booklet that outlines an emancipatory and digitally informed prison pedagogy. As a long-term goal of my “Rust Belt” scholarship, I plan to carry out an auto-ethnographic research project concerning a 150-year history of everyday violence on Milwaukee’s South Side.
WRITING ABOUT THE RUST BELT
Writing about teaching and Applied Anthropology
“WINDOW WASHERS ON A WINDOWLESS PRISON”. JOURNAL FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA. DOI:10.1002/NAD.12124
2020
This photographic essay examines the erasure of prisons from the urban landscape. The false or blind windows symbolize an important point of reflection for understanding the process of community making that surrounds incarceration.
“A PANDEMIC IN PRISONS”. IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 28.2: 352-353. DOI:10.1111/1469-8676.12857
2020
In reaction to the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, there have been as many as 40 prison uprisings in places as diverse as Italy, Thailand, Iran, Colombia and the USA. With densely populated cell blocks, poorly circulated air, and substandard water and food supplies, prisons are the worst places to be during a pandemic. Moreover, COVID-19 has proven deadliest for the fastest-growing incarcerated populations in the Global North: the elderly (Skarupski et al. 2018) and the chronically ill (Udo 2019). As an ethnographer who taught anthropology to prisoners during the US COVID-19 outbreak, I paid close attention to how understandings of disease, pandemic and quarantine were filtered through the problematic conditions of a carceral state.
“DISCUSSING POLICY WITH PRISONERS.” ANTHROPOLOGY NEWS, JUNE 16, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1417
2020
I teach an anthropology course within the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. The course is online in that video lectures, movies, assignments, and discussions are carried out via a computer. The learning process is estranged but also incredibly intimate. I never see my students face-to-face. Students admit to you their deepest fears such as failure to succeed on the outside. They reveal their most profound sins including homicide. They read everything I assign. Their writing is detailed. And, their desire to succeed is rooted in a radical hope for the future. My students are a captured population yearning to be free.
“FROM FREIRE TO FOUCAULT: DESIGNING A CRITICAL PRISON PEDAGOGY”
IN TRANSFORMING AND RESHAPING GENERAL EDUCATION. EDITORS JENNIFER R. WIES AND HILLARY HALDALE. ROUTLEDGE.
2022
University education can only be truly transformative when it respects the problems that learners bring into the classroom. Educators who work with marginalized, traumatized, and non-traditional communities have the responsibility of translating general education into skills that address real- world problems. A transformative university education in prisons, for example, must center the everyday problems of incarceration as a source of knowledge creation. This chapter describes how a general education curriculum based around the work of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) can address the everyday problems of incarcerated learners. Through a process of “getting to Foucault,” I describe my classroom goal of teaching incarcerated learners to see the anthropological problem of a prison. The chapter first discusses how the problem-posing education outlined by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed can be used as a model to help incarcerated learners. The chapter then describes the design of student self-reflections housed across eight prisons and enrolled in an online “Introduction to Anthropology” course for the Milwaukee Area Technical College. The final section of this chapter offers examples of how incarcerated learners relate Foucault’s description of the carceral state to their everyday lives. I find that the writing of incarcerated learners can illuminate how we communicate scholarly knowledge to introductory learners. The below case study and analysis can also be useful in understanding the effects of applied anthropological education on a highly marginalized physical, legal, and social space.
‘WHOEVER DIES, DIES’: A PEDAGOGICAL MODEL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK IN UNITED STATES PRISONS” IN HUMAN ORGANIZATION 80 (4): 282-291
2021
A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of the United States prison population, or five times the rate found in the general population, had been infected. Limited social distancing and difficult to implement preventative measures helped to spread COVID-19 in prisons, while many incarcerated individuals felt that government policy prevented their ability to self-care. These feelings of alienation reflect a history of policy that links disease to deviance and social death. Based on the written self-reflections of anthropology students in Wisconsin prisons, this article outlines an ethnographic and pedagogical model for analyzing pandemic policy. Students learned to relate anthropological terminology to their critiques of policy and revealed how prisoners adapted to feelings of invisibility and hopelessness during a pandemic.