Inner Views: A Short Film by Roberto Almaraz
This Short Film was created and edited by Roberto Almaraz (He/Him), a second year American Studies major, with an interest in film. It was created in the Fall 2020 course AMS 311s “Prison Art, Lit, and Protest.” The short film is meant to juxtapose recently released perspectives of prison to the formerly released in order to contextualize life outside the system after recuperating and contrast the audience perspective with the experience of others. Special Thanks to the participants: Anna Perez & Xavier Perez" What follows is an introductory essay and the short film.
Interviewing relatives about their experience in prison was meant to shed light on the contemporary perspective of Texas prisons from released Latinx people. In formulating the questions I attempted to present materials that were related to prison literature pertaining to Chicano and prison liberation. I adhered to Texas After Violence’s series Documenting Narratives of Violence to minimize negative effects described by the Substance Abuse AndMental Health Services Administration definition of trauma: “...a set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”(Field) Where I avoid traumatic responses I attempt to maximize the interview’s outreach, and in turn the participants’ perspective and advocacy a for their concerns. Research has questioned the harm interviews impose on prisoners, questioning their awareness of the interview prior to its occurrence and subsequent harm that may come afterwards. A study titled “Inmate Perceptions of the Benefit and Harm of Prison Interviews” brings these questions into light and proposes that traumatic situations don’t affect the incarcerated post-interview “Respondents reported some intangible benefits and no harms or negative consequences. They also reported the interviews as being a positive and rewarding experience and uniformly said that they had not been subject to coercive persuasion.”(Copes, et al.) Hoping to find a happy medium amongst the two sources positive aspects, I attempted to keep questioning neutral, with most of the questions pertaining to their perspective rather than their individual experience.
Through my first question I hoped to draw attention to the perception of need of prisons by asking participants about their treatment, how they felt they were treated well, versus how they were treated poorly. “If prison, in its philosophical origin, was meant as a humane alternative to beatings or torture or death, it has transformed into a fixed feature of modern light, one that is not know, even by its supporters and administrators, for its humanity.”(Kushner) As Rachel Kushner sought to answer questions of perceptions of humanity in prison through her interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, I hoped a question about their perspective on the treatment of the incarcerated would shed insight into its “humanity” while juxtaposing their perspective to the audience. I was interested heavily on the perception of time in prison, aspects of how time was tracked, how it affected the psyche, and how one passed it. In reading Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing I became intrigued with notions of non-linear comprehensions of time. Abnormal comprehensions of time exist inside prison and affect, at the very least, how the incarcerated remember their loved one’s but can problematize their relationship with their kin as well. The question of how they kept passed time while incarcerated was vital to openly discussing this topic and how they managed time after their release. The question then led to how books helped with their sentence, if at all, as both participants utilized books as means of grounding. Recognized by the U.S. Supreme court as a privilege, literature is effectively used as a merit system for some prisoners “The majority opinion in Beard v. Banks constructs reading as a privilege that best serves the interests of the penal system when it is denied to uncooperative prisoners.”(Sweeney) In questions about time, their affinity for books came to surface and portrays reading as a virtue of prison culture that is effectively used against them with consequence of longer sentences and stripped privileges.
Further questions delve into the participants' perception of outside attitudes toward the recently released. I asked about their views on how society would treat them after serving their time to frame their answer within time, as they have led a life past prison to establish themselves since their release. This concern came from a Paper about perceptions of the formerly incarcerated by Suzanne Oboler and how they affect incarceration throughout communities “Latino and African American youth, increasingly rely and play on public anxieties about race and crime, hence reinforcing the public perception of an inherent connection between them.”(Oboler) Formulating this question in a broad manner to draw a personal response from the participants and bring perspective to the discussion surrounding perceptions of rehabilitation and crime.
Through these questions and participant answers’ I hope to strike an empathetic response to the experience of the individual prisoners to encourage a complex understanding of the formally incarcerated. By not subjecting the interviewees to complex questioning pertaining to specific articles and papers, I attempted to summarize article and reading concepts into the form of questions in order to gain a contemporary perspective into prison culture and life after. The answers given by participants should speak to their own perspectives, and I hope through this introduction to at least provide insight into what the intentions were behind the film.
Citations
Copes, Heith, et al. “Inmates’ Perceptions of the Benefits and Harm of Prison Interviews.”
Field Methods, vol. 25, no. 2, May 2013, pp. 182–196, doi:10.1177/1525822X12465798.
Kushner, R. (2019, April 17). Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind .
Oboler, S. (2008). "Viviendo En El Olvido": Behind Bars, Latinos and Prison.
Sweeney, M. (2010). In Reading is my window: books and the art of reading in women's prisons. Introduction, University of North Carolina Press.
Ward, J. (2018). Sing, unburied, sing. Bloomsbury.
Edited & shot by: Roberto Almaraz
Songs by: Neutral Milk Hotel
Final for my Prison Literature course.
5 Questions with Dr. Iván Chaar López
AMS : ATX is thrilled to sit down with Dr. Iván Chaar López, who joined the UT AMS faculty in Fall 2020. Dr. Chaar López’s work examines the politics and aesthetics of digital technologies and the place of Latina/o/xs as targets, users, and developers of digital lifeworlds. He is currently working on a book, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion, and a number of other exciting projects here at UT. After earning his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Dr. Chaar López completed a Mellon Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship in Latino/a Studies and Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University.
Read on to learn more about Dr. Chaar López’s academic background, current research and projects, and teaching, and check out his website here!
1. To start, what is your academic background? How does this inform your work today?
Being born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I got my bachelors and masters in History at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, also known as “la iupi.” While at la iupi, I grew interested in meaning making practices and the role of technology in these processes. That led to a master's thesis devoted to studying a filmed event of police violence in Puerto Rico in 2007. A few police agents intervened with a man participating in a quinceañera caravan. Their intervention quickly became lethally violent and one of the officers shot the man. The event was recorded on a digital camera, given to Univision, transmitted on the evening news, and recorded by someone who then uploaded it to YouTube. The filmed incident quickly became a viral event. The social network site platform had only existed for 2 years and was dominated by video logs, personal videos focusing on personal stories. Puerto Ricans, however, made quick use of the site as a platform to organize against state and police violence. I was intrigued by these dynamics and knew I wanted to continue to think about information technologies and politics. And that’s what I did when I pursued my doctoral degree at the University of Michigan between 2012-2018.
2. How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society? I'm particularly interested in hearing about how you situate your work with The Precarity Lab.
I continue to think, research, and write about information technologies and politics through the framework afforded by space and place. I’m especially interested with the ways borderlands can be understood in relation to technology, that is both as a site of technological development and as a technology itself—an artifact for drawing out relations, making sense. I see this way of approaching information technologies as part of a growing push to think science and technology through the methodological toolboxes of critical race theory, feminist practices, and imperial formations.
The Precarity Lab, of which I’ve been a founding member since 2016, has pursued a research agenda committed to understanding digital technologies in a context of intensifying precarization and capitalist crisis. The vast reach and complexity of networked technologies required, we thought, a different way to examine them, one that would be interdisciplinary, multi-sited, and comparative. To pursue this research agenda, we experimented with collaborative research and writing. And so all of the members and collaborators of the lab have their own (inter)disciplinary expertise (i.e., Information Studies, Ethnic Studies, Latina/o Studies, African American Studies, STS, Ethnography, History) and geographical areas of focus (i.e., the US, Europe, China, Palestine, US-Mexico border, South Asia). The results are two co-written pieces, one published by Social Text and the book Technoprecarious, which just came out at the end of 2020.
3. What sort of classes do you teach at UT? How does your research inform your teaching?
I haven’t been at UT long; I began my position in August 2020. Most of my classes are at the intersection of Digital Studies, Science & Technology Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies. I’ve taught an undergrad class on “Digital Cultures” (AMS 370, previously titled “Art & Data in the Digital Age”), and this semester I’m teaching a graduate course on “Borderlands, Technology, Race” and an “Introduction to American Studies” that uses computers and the Internet as its core objects of study. The classes I teach, then, draw heavily from my areas of expertise.
4. What projects are you excited about working on in the future?
I’m working on a few projects at the moment. My main project is my book manuscript, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion, which grapples with the central role information technologies have played in border enforcement since the mid-twentieth century.
I’m also thrilled to be establishing the Border Tech Lab at UT Austin. The BTL draws inspiration from my experience in Precarity Lab where, first as a Ph.D. candidate and then as a postdoc, I worked closely with a range of thinkers. As the principal investigator of the BTL, I will work closely with undergraduate and graduate students to pursue interdisciplinary research on technologies and boundary production. We will ask how knowledge communities and technologies push the boundaries of imagination even as they work to delineate the boundaries of the possible. We will begin working on two projects. One is devoted to researching the place of anti-immigrant nativist organizations in the use of unmanned aerial systems. The other centers on the history of electronics manufacturing along the US-Mexico borderlands since the 1960s as a way to interrogate the technopolitics of special economic zones, non-essential knowledge, and disposability.
5. And, finally, the million-dollar question: if you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?
I’m the last person to support fixing a definition of our field, so consider this a contingent, unstable, and changing description: American Studies is an interdisciplinary practice that pays close attention to the experiences of people in and in relation to the U.S., and its cultural and social formations.
The Growth of Prisons and Decline of Rehabilitative Education
Christian "Alex" Gonzalez is a first year mathematics major at UT Austin. He wrote this post for AMS 311s “Prison Art, Literature, and Protest.”
Largely owing to the police crackdowns that accompanied Nixon and Reagan’s platforms of “law and order,” along with popular public opinion throughout the 1990s that felons should face tougher consequences and longer sentences, the post-1980s U.S. has seen both a boom in prison populations and a sharp decline in rehabilitative education available for prisoners.
To understand the crisis that this upward trend in prison growth has posed for U.S. inmates and minorities, one must first recognize the prison’s history and its original function—to rehabilitate. As Ruth Gilmore notes in the New York Times Magazine, imprisonment as a form of punishment itself first rose as a reaction to traditional English corporal punishment. “The penitentiary movement in both England and the United States in the early 19th century was motivated in part by the demand for more humanitarian punishment. Prison was the reform” (4). Only recently in modern history has prison risen to become the de facto mode of punishment rather than an imagined alternative. Complete with new human rights violations and practically zero efforts at rehabilitation, the contemporary prison stands in stark contrast to its philosophical origins as being a “humane alternative to beatings or tortures or death,” instead becoming a “fixed feature of modern life” that enforces lower class oppression (Gilmore 4). Whether or not that fixture in our social consciousness stems from the onslaught of prison images found in popular media, as Angela Davis argues in her book Are Prisons Obsolete, the prison system has nonetheless become a well into which society deposits its “undesirables,” a process often justified through society’s attitude toward imprisonment as a “fate reserved for the ‘evildoers’” (Davis 16). What’s worse is the manner in which this fate is typically reserved for people of color; as taken from a study done by the Pew Research Center, African Americans are currently incarcerated at a rate of 1,501 per 100,000 adults, almost double that of Hispanic people (797 per 100,000) and nearly six times that of white people (268 per 100,000). As for the ramifications that accompany being physically placed in a prison, Davis’s “well” truly nails the idea. The deeper the state of incarceration, the deeper the trap. This fact was explored personally in George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, where being assigned to Max Row virtually condemned an inmate to life in prison unless they begged and grovelled their way out. Even with begging, one “could count on one hand the number of people who have been paroled to the streets from [Max Row] proper…To go from here to the outside world is unthinkable” (pp. 21-22).
However, for as awful and far-removed from rehabilitative care the prison system currently is, hope persisted at one point in the form of prison education programs. These programs, often kept afloat by federal Pell Grants, provided a way out for prisoners not only through recreational activities like reading and discussion group participation, but also through the application of learned knowledge and acquired degrees to the outside job market. Ranging from writing sessions to career technical education, prisoners interested in learning held the opportunity to truly reform their future and worldview—regardless of the circumstances that led to their incarceration. Higher education programs were once widespread in prisons as well: from 1965 to 1973, during a time New York professor Lee Bernstein dubbed the “Black Arts Movement,” the number of college-level programs in U.S. prisons increased “over fifteen-fold to 182.” Ten years later, there were “350 programs in forty-five states, with roughly 10 percent of all inmates attending a prison college” (Bernstein 298). To see the positive effect college programs had on prisoners, it’s useful to look at the statistics for prisoners who did and did not participate. According to 2011 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, prisoners without access to higher education programs (the norm for U.S. facilities) had recidivism rates of about 68 percent within three years of release and 77 percent within five, with more than 56 percent of rearrests being made within the first year after release. However, prisoners who participated in education programs saw their recidivism rates cut by over 43 percent, with higher degrees corresponding to lower return rates (Northwestern pp. 1-2). While some argue that these drops in recidivism rates came less from the availability of educational programs and more from the prisoners’ own motivations to seek freedom, the wide-scale effect higher education programs had regardless is enough to prove their worth in effort and funding. However, it is important to acknowledge that—like prison populations and the spread of U.S. racial inequality in general—equal access to these educational programs was not guaranteed for minorities. As discussed in Bernstein’s novel, the figures for African and Hispanic American inmates in 1960s-1970s prison classrooms maintained an uneven proportion when compared to their white counterparts. For example, while San Quentin State Prison in California was “54 percent white in 1969, its college program was 70 percent white. The figures for African Americans were 20.2 percent in program vs. 30 percent in the general population, for Chicanos, 9.2 percent vs. 15 percent” (Bernstein 299). Regardless, the opportunity for escape that higher education programs provided can not be overstated. Though educational exclusion was (and still is) a reality for minorities in and out of prison, having those higher education systems in place provided a strong safety net for a population that’s otherwise frequently ignored by society.
However, despite the clear benefits higher education programs pose to prison inmates, the number of such programs offered in the U.S. has dwindled to a historic low. Spurred on by the aforementioned tough views on crime held by the public, policy officials felt the need to cut federal funding for not only prison education programs, but prison rehabilitative care in general. Bernstein brings up the efforts of conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who first proposed the ban on Pell Grants for incarcerated people (312). The greatest offender, however, was Bill Clinton’s signed 1994 Crime Bill, which included provisions that massively upscaled prison construction and eliminated prisoners from eligibility for federal Pell Grants (thus making good on Helms’s ban). The latter is the more significant; by removing funding from an overwhelmingly poor population like incarcerated people, whose in-prison college programs largely depend on federal grants (tuition isn’t exactly a thing), higher educational programs for inmates were essentially eliminated. (Sawyer pp. 1-2) The drive to cut Pell grants didn’t necessarily stem from a shortage of funds or budgetary concerns, either—in fact, it was quite the opposite. Even at their peak in the 1980s, when an estimated “772 higher education programs were operating in 1,287 correctional facilities across the nation,” Pell aid for prisons only made up “less than 1 percent of total Pell spending” (Sawyer 2). The same 1994 bill that outright cut federal aid for prisoners also allocated $9.7 billion in funding for prison management and construction, $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs, an additional $2.1 billion for the FBI and other Justice Department components, and even more funding for 100,000 new police officers (“Law Enforcement Act of 1994”). If the presence of funds wasn’t an issue (it normally isn’t, anyway), it might seem strange then that a seemingly inconsequential program in terms of cost with such great importance for hundreds of thousands was eliminated outright. However, just like with prisons in general, a deeper look at social context is imperative.
It’s no accident that prison systems emerged as a mode of suppression just as segregation was finishing up its last rounds. After all, the historic consolidation of power seen amongst U.S. elites has always revolved around exploiting fear to silence opposition; one need only look at the systems of indentured servitude in the colonial era, slavery in the 1800s, chain gangs following the Civil War, and segregation in the 1900s to spot this pattern. However, to say the move from racially separated facilities to racially motivated prison systems was intentionally deliberate isn’t exactly true, either. As Gilmore explains in her article, “Prisons are not a result of a desire by ‘bad’ people to lock up poor people and people of color. The state did not wake up one morning and say, ‘Let’s be mean to black people.’ All these other things had to happen that made it turn out like this” (14). Though public prisons don’t operate off of a for-profit motive, understanding their position in the nation’s capitalist system offers a clearer perspective behind their boom in the 1980s. For one, public prisons run on government funding rather than profits; what this entails is their direct competition with other state agencies (education, health care, police, etc.) for revenue, especially since the majority of money given to jails inevitably goes toward prisoner upkeep and staff salaries. When the social-welfare side of government shrinks during times of strict “austerity” (as Gilmore puts it), this competition kicks in and public prisons subsequently receive funding that traditionally would’ve gone elsewhere (12-13). By increasing funding for public prisons, correctional officers’ unions naturally enjoy a similar surge in power and thus become better able to enact their pro-prison policies when lobbying. Combine this fact with the economic crisis left behind under Jimmy Carter and Reagan’s answer to the growing call for heightened defense spending, both of which enforced that “austere” atmosphere needed, and you get a decently-sized origin story behind the 1980s prison boom (Gilmore 12, “United States Presidential Election” 10).
However, to identify why the 1980s prison boom happened (i.e. the spark that lit the fuse), Reagan’s War on Drugs is by far the most documented cause. Predicated on the “tough on crime” stances of the era, the War on Drugs brought massive amounts of people into the prison system by criminalizing drug use and heavily raising the punishments for offenders. What’s worse, as exemplified by the infamous 100-to-1 powder to crack cocaine sentencing disparity, the War on Drugs disproportionately targeted people of color and bolstered disintegration in communities already suffering from corporations seeking cheap labor overseas (Davis 16, 109). In attacking vulnerable people devastated by the economy passed under Nixon and Carter, Reagan essentially turned classes’ worth of citizens into “perfect candidates for prison,” feeding the prison complex already growing at the behest of powerful correctional officers’ unions (Davis 16, Gilmore 12). Starting with around 300,000 in 1980, the number of U.S. prisoners reached 700,000 within a decade and tripled from there to over 2,100,000 by 2008, resulting in the U.S. containing nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population (Davis 10). The exploitation of fear from the previous paragraph comes into play with how quickly the nation adapted to this outgrowth; as Davis explains on an individual level, “no one wants to go to prison…Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives” (15). This disconnection from reality, being a coping mechanism in and of itself, thus falls prey to the coping mechanisms that society enforces—particularly racism. To avoid thinking of prison as a reality for ourselves, we reserve it as a fate “reserved for others, a fate reserved for the ‘evildoers’” who, in the collective imagination, are often “fantasized as people of color” (16). When prison numbers exploded in the 1980s, the action of filling and constructing even more prisons simply became secondhand to the officials in charge. What may have been a problem for a decade expanded across generations, as the utility of shoving society’s undesirables into cages became more and more accepted as commonplace amongst the public. This, then, is part of the reason why many saw fit the removal of funding for upper educational programs for prisoners. Money wasn’t the issue; rather, it was the unwanted potential of having a class of people demonized as “evildoers” becoming empowered enough to make their way back into society. It was the ignorance developed by the public over years of being separated by the prison-susceptible population, ignorance born from the public’s innately-developed fear stretching across decades, that disregarded the potential for hundreds of thousands.
To be sure, not all prisoners convicted after the Reagan era were there for non-violent crimes like drug possession or petty robbery; in fact, violent offenders continue to constitute nearly fifty percent of incarcerated people nationwide while drug offenders only compose less than twenty (Gilmore 19). However, acknowledging this fact doesn’t downplay the reality of incarceration; rather, it prevents us from falling into the “myth,” as Gilmore dubs it, of narratives that have us almost offhandedly believing that prisons should be reserved for individuals who truly commit serious crimes. Violent crime or not, prisons have still grown exponentially since the Reagan era and are still exacting policies that deprive their populations of freedom, all while avoiding the very problems that led to their growth in the first place. If even necessary, prisons should be an absolute last resort for offenders—only put in place after extensive effort to rehabilitate the prisoner in question or changing the legislation that led to their conviction. Continuing the practice of policing as it is, where prisons or excessive fines replace the process of addressing wrongs rightfully, only sinks society deeper into the well of abusing easy substitutes like prison. Enforcing change is what’s necessary—change that has us assessing motives and reforming conditions instead of locking away people the second they veer from words written on paper.
Works Cited
Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete?: an Open Media Book. ReadHowYouWant, 2010.
Bernstein, Lee. “Prison Writers and the Black Arts Movement.” America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s, University of North Carolina Press, 2010, pp. 297–316.
Kushner, Rachel. “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Apr. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/ magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html.
Gramlich, John. “Black Imprisonment Rate in the U.S. Has Fallen by a Third since 2006.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 6 Aug. 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ 2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-hispanic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/.
Jackson, George, and Jonathan Jackson. Soledad Brother: the Prison Letters of George Jackson. Lawrence Hill Books, 2006.
Northwestern Prison Education Program, Northwestern University, sites.northwestern.edu/npep/ benefits-of-prison-education/.
Sawyer, Wendy. “Since You Asked: How Did the 1994 Crime Bill Affect Prison College Programs?” Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/08/22/college- in-prison/.
“United States Presidential Election of 1980.” Edited by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, 28 Oct. 2019, www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1980/General-election-campaign.
“Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.” National Criminal Justice Reference Service, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/billfs.txt.
Is An Architecturally Ethical Prison Possible?
Sarah Dalby is a second-year Architectural Engineering student at UT Austin. She enjoys cats, architecture, and design. She created this project in AMS 311S Prison Art, Literature, and Protest.
I have created 3D models of two very different prisons. The first, which is a scientifically oppressive prison, comes from the Quaker school of thought. Using the Panopticon theory as described by Foucault, the cells are arranged in a circle which all face inwards toward a guard observation tower. The cells are 5 feet by 9 feet and each have a small toilet installed, which I drew from an article about Alcatraz, which is famous for its subpar conditions (“Alcatraz - Quick Facts”). Everything is made of concrete and metal, which causes the temperature to always be extremely cold or extremely hot. These materials also cause the sound to reverberate and cause raised levels of stress in the incarcerated people, as well as the guards (Slade). As in the concept of the panopticon, there is no privacy, as the inmates can be seen by the guards at all times because of the architectural shape of the building. The materials and lack of natural lighting also contribute to sensory deprivation of the prisoners and mental deterioration. While this prison is meant to be cost-effective and secure, its implementation would contribute to the continued inhumane treatment of incarcerated people and mental illnesses inside carceral facilities.
For the more “ethical” prison, I wanted to utilize organic shapes and natural lighting, which are both proven to be reparative design features and promote healing. While it may be a carceral facility, it can still be comfortable and interesting, as well as serve as a valuable piece of architecture in a wider context. While my model is very simplistic, I wanted to exemplify some proven/researched aspects that would “improve” prison life for incarcerated individuals. One aspect was the inclusion of options for living quarters; inmates would have the option to choose a private room (which are all larger than my college dorm room) or a community-living style, which still has privacy measures. It is important to provide options and choice in an environment where one is already oppressed and unable to leave in order to preserve one's identity and protect their privacy. While there should be the option for community living, Oshinsky warns that open bunks in a large room can create violence and even increase the likelihood of sexual assaults, so it is important that there is adequate privacy in both living options (Oshinsky). In the private rooms, there is furniture and bathrooms that meet a standard for “safe” cells as established by the English Prison Service (Fairweather). These measures work to avoid suicide attempts and create a more supportive and sanitary environment. This is accomplished in part by using warmer, softer materials such as cork, wood, fabric, etc. These kinds of materials are repeated throughout the prison rooms and structure in order to reduce sound reverberation and make temperature regulation easier. These seemingly small features contribute to the overall comfort and mental stability of the incarcerated individuals and would be a substantial improvement to current carceral facilities. In the images, there is also mountain scenery which further contributes to healing and creates a connection to nature.
The biggest takeaway from this project, in my opinion, is that it would not be difficult to build more humane prisons. The question of why governments do not attempt to achieve a higher standard for prison architecture is a complicated topic that should be explored in a larger context. There are simple improvements that would significantly improve conditions and mental illness, while still keeping costs low (and sometimes lower)than what is currently in place.
Works Cited
“Alcatraz - Quick Facts.” Alcatraz Facts & Figures, Ocean View Publishing, www.alcatrazhistory.com/factsnfig.htm.
Fairweather, Leslie, and McConville Seán. Prison Architecture: Policy, Design, and Experience. 1st ed., Architectural Press, 2003.
Foucault, Michel “Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts.” Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/252435.
“Redesigning Prison: the Architecture and Ethics of Rehabilitation.” Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13602365.2019.1578072.
Oshinsky, David M. "Worse than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. Free Press Paperbacks Published by Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Slade, Rachael. “Is There Such a Thing as ‘Good’ Prison Design?” Architectural Digest, 30 Apr. 2018,
www.architecturaldigest.com/story/is-there-such-a-thing-as-good-prison-design.
Interview with UT AMS Alumnus Dr. Robert Matej Bednar, Author of “Road Scars”
Dr. Robert Matej Bednar, an alumnus of UT American Studies’ Ph.D. Program, is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Communication Studies at Southwestern University. Dr. Bednar’s newest book, Road Scars: Place, Automobility, and Road Trauma, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in July. Current UT AMS Ph.D. student Hartlyn Haynes sat down (virtually, of course) with Dr. Bednar to chat about the book and his work as a scholar-photographer, how he engages with questions of cultural trauma, his commitment to public scholarship and how it influences his pedagogy, and future projects. Check out Dr. Bednar’s website, which features more of his work and an archive of student work throughout the years, here.
Q: First of all, congratulations on the publication of your new book, Road Scars: Place, Automobility, and Road Trauma! Can you tell us a bit more about this project and what brought you to it?
A: In Road Scars: Place, Automobility, and Road Trauma, I argue that roadside car crash shrines give embodied form to an unresolved cultural trauma embedded within American car culture. The book is based on nearly two decades of fieldwork in Texas and the American Southwest and features 172 original color photographs. Given the fact that I am both a photographer and a scholar, it was very important to me that the book work like that, with a balance of written analysis and pictures. In the book, I use both words and pictures to show how it matters that these shrines, created by private individuals to memorialize other private individuals, are located on the roadside, where they anchor road trauma to a place, magnetize objects within the site, change over time in performative ways, and ultimately create a loose but palpable public of drivers who know that there is a massive but disavowed cultural trauma at the center of the American commitment to cars and car culture.
As for what brought me to it, I really kind of stumbled on the project. My previous big project, carried over from my days in the AMS PhD program at UT, was a field analysis of how tourists take pictures at scenic overlooks in the image-saturated National Parks of the American West. When I started the shrine project, I thought it was an extension of that work in the sense that both projects are about how people use public resources for both common and divergent ends, and both are field-based projects that involve both written analysis and original photography. I started with a single American Studies Association presentation in October 2003 that I saw playing out as a chapter in a larger book called Making Space about how people make space for themselves in public landscapes, but the emotional response I had to the sites stopped me in my tracks.
From there, it took me years spending time on the road photographing shrines to figure out how they work on that dual level for both intimates who know the people being celebrated in the shrines and the rest of us driving by, and just as many years figuring out how to write the thing and find a publisher. But the longer I spent on it, I realized that the time I was spending was actually enriching the work, particularly as it allowed me to document how roadside shrines change over time, which is one of the central contributions of the book. There are some shrines I have photographed multiple times for eighteen years, and watching them change over time has shown me that shrines are more about negotiating trauma than they are about memory.
Q: How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society?
A: The most important way that I am engaged with larger conversations in the academy and in American society today is in my work on the visuality, materiality, and spatiality of dispersed cultural traumas. I recently gave a talk based on my book (linked off my website) that brought my work into conversation with the visual/material/spatial culture of Black Lives Matter and Me Too and explores how these different cultural traumas get anchored and magnetized in pictures, objects, and places. The cultural politics are different in these different realms, but I see myself as part of a group of scholars trying to figure out how to understand how ordinary people use objects and places to address other ordinary people to make things happen in the world, particularly around individual and collective trauma.
In addition to connecting to current work on cultural traumas, my work since I was in grad school in AMS at UT has been focused on understanding the apparently self-generating normative cultural practices people perform when they produce and encounter pictures, material objects, assemblages, and landscapes. The kinds of things I have studied most—snapshot photography practices at National Park scenic overlook structures and my ongoing project on roadside car crash shines—are fundamentally about things that people do without ever being explicitly trained to do them, and yet everyone knows what to do, in their body. These to me are the most fundamental cultural processes to try to understand, because they function under the radar of personal and cultural consciousness, at the level of what Bourdieu calls habitus. Within that, I focus mostly on the way these cultural practices make things happen in the world, such as maintaining, extending, and/or contesting particular visualities, materialities, epistemologies, spatialities, and temporalities. And finally, I am interested in the ways people use the same public resources for divergent purposes and, as they do, end up mapping those different purposes back onto places and visual objects in ways that leave traces for all of us to see and sense.
Q: How does your scholarship inform your teaching? Your website features a trove of student work, so I am especially curious if, and how, you imagine public scholarship as part of your pedagogy.
A: My teaching and scholarship are inseparable. Part of that I attribute to the fact that I teach at Southwestern, a national liberal arts college with a teacher-scholar model, where we work to balance our commitments to teaching, scholarship, and university governance in very different ways than faculty are expected to do at a R1 institution like UT. Of course, the reason I thrive in this kind of higher education environment is that I already lived those values when I was a grad student, when I was working on my project on snapshot photography in the National Parks of the American West while I was teaching an AMS 315 course called “Contemporary American West.” But I would attribute my commitment to public scholarship to two other sources as well: the influence of my background and ongoing engagement with American Studies, with its long tradition of creating public intellectuals, and the fact that since for the last 24 years I have taught in Communication Studies, which has a similar commitment. Because both fields take as their object the critical study of everyday cultural practices, they produce scholarship that is both interesting and accessible to general readers as well as scholars.
The work I produce is like that, and the work my students produce is as well. I train students to think of themselves as scholars working for the public good. Whatever they do, I want them to be able to mobilize the critical analytical and writing skills I teach them to help people understand how culture, power, and identity work. Thinking of our work that way helps keep us from just sitting around feeling smart together about our ability to analyze normative cultural practices. Instead, I focus on propelling students out into the world to bring their skills to bear on problems of equity, inclusion, and belonging. I sometimes talk about it as being a kind of player-coach instead of a sideline coach or a sports commentator: you provide critique from within the game to make sure that we can all understand how to be more self-reflexive about how we do culture. That is the main reason I have given my students a platform for their work alongside my own on my website. I encourage people to check it out and remember that all of the work you are seeing is by undergraduates. Southwestern is an entirely undergraduate institution, so all of my attention as a teacher-scholar goes to them, and they step up to the challenge.
Q: What projects are you excited about working on in the future?
A: Right now, as I cool off from a project that took way longer than I projected, I am focused on a set of smaller-scale articles about shrines and automobility instead of a book. My wife Danielle is a therapist who works with clients undergoing trauma every day, and we are talking about doing a book together where I photograph shrine sites and we work together to interview the people who make the shrines, which is something I bracketed off for this project as I focused on their visuality, materiality, and spatiality. I may also still write that book called Making Space I started writing in 2003 when I got sidetracked on this book.
Q: And, finally, the burning question: if you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?
A: Oh, my. I remember asking this question a lot when I was in grad school. Here’s my answer: American Studies is a transdisciplinary endeavor focused on analyzing the extraordinarily complex and contested set of peoples, objects, places, practices and relations that make up our common research object: “American culture.”
“Dear Mrs. Lincoln,” a Comic/Sonic Essay
Coyote Shook is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
This comic/sonic essay takes up questions of Mary Todd Lincoln through a disability lens. Remembered as America's most prolific "crazy bitch," she rivals perhaps only Abigail Adams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Hillary Clinton when it comes to research and public interest about First Ladies. However, biographies of her husband cast her as another chaotic obstacle, with her gender and her disability both serving to position Mr. Lincoln as innately benevolent, patient, and an iron boat treading stormy waters. Not only was his political universe demanding, his home, the social construction of Victorian American domesticity, was likewise turbulent, historians would have us believe. Furthermore, specific discourse into Mrs. Lincoln focuses disproportionately on diagnosis of her mental illness. While she was institutionalized and over-prescribed opium-based medicine for much of her adult life, diagnosing her mental health almost a century and a half after her death is not especially generative. What is generative, however, is parsing through the methods in which her son Robert and Illinois courts declared her legally insane (a legal category in late 19th century America rather than a medical one) and institutionalized. Grief certainly played a part in it. She was a woman familiar with loss. Out of her husband and four children, her death only antedated Robert's, her estranged son. Her grief after her son Willie's death was public, severe, and, by her husband's estimation, excessive enough for him to threaten her with the madhouse at least once.
This essay uses pictures and sound to study these constructions and critically evaluate the role Mrs. Lincoln plays in cultural memory. Deliberately sparse on words, it relies on music, medical soundscape, and black-and-white pictures to invite the reader to consider their own perceptions of not only Mrs. Lincoln, but the lingering impact of Victorian conceptions of gender and mental health.
Dispatches from Air Force One
Iana Robitaille is a 2nd-year doctoral student in English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the intersection of contemporary transnational and global Anglophone fiction, postcolonial studies, and post-1945 American culture.
Sometime in late February, I was lying on my couch and idly skimming a new book. I mean “new” here in a very grad-student sense of the word: assigned for a seminar, purchased “Used - Good” from whatever independent seller was cheapest. The book was Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, and I would be reading it several weeks later in a course on literature of the global middle ages.
My initial assessment, as I lay there so unwittingly, was that this copy was a bit more “used” than “good.” There were a lot of handwritten notes in the margins, all in pen; on the last few pages were scrawled what appeared to be lists of names, a family tree, some translated terms. I flipped quickly from back to front, and the book opened to a small, white card that had been tucked between two pages. “UPI Correspondent” was printed in black at the top. Beneath that, in blue, was the seal of the President of the United States. And below that still, in bold, blue letters: “Welcome Aboard Air Force One.”
I took a few moments to consider what this might mean for the book in my hands. It seemed legit—the “UPI” designation was too specific not to be—and the marginalia struck me as sufficiently detailed and haphazard to be the work of a member of the press. That was enough for me; I took swift action, sending proof by way of Snapchat to a few close friends, the caption something to the effect of, “tfw the used book u bought for a sem was on Air Force One w/ POTUS.”
Nice.
I don’t think more about the book until I’m reading it for class several weeks later. In that time I discover a number of additional brief, personal notes among its pages and a second artifact: a torn ticket stub from The Egyptian Museum in Cairo. By now I am decidedly enchanted. Who was this mystery reader? What were they doing in Cairo—and when? We discuss the text in a seminar on March 9, a Monday. Four days later, my morning run is interrupted by an email from the university. Campus remains closed for the remainder of the semester.
There was a lot of free time in the beginning. Or empty time, maybe. I took morning walks. I also took evening walks. I finally unwrapped and solved a Keith Haring jigsaw puzzle that I’d been gifted a year earlier. My roommate and I tried to watch Thor; we couldn’t finish it. We baked a carrot cake and washed it down with a bottle of prosecco. Within seven days, the neighborhood pedestrians—in wordless, determined solidarity—reclaimed the shuttered golf course as our own. I hopped a flight to Cairo.
I am always amazed by how easy it really is, if you can discern the right combination of keywords, to find someone you’re looking for with Google. I’ve developed that skill, and in the end it made quick work of my research. Since I know literally nothing, I started with the basics: “UPI media.” United Press International—that makes sense. Who gets a press pass to Air Force One? I tried “UPI White House correspondent,” and the results were almost disappointingly conclusive. Helen Thomas, pioneering American reporter and the first female member of the White House press corps, worked at United Press for 57 years.
The rest was simple. Ghosh’s novel was published in 1992 and Thomas departed UPI in May of 2000—an eight-year window. The H.W. administration? Clinton? Wikipedia, I now know, has a page documenting all U.S. presidential visits to the Middle East. Bush visited Egypt only once, in 1990. Too early. Clinton visited twice within that time frame, once from October 25-26, 1994 and again on May 13, 1996. Surely, I thought, the UPI website has a digital archive that one could search by date? It does; I did. On October 26, 1994, Helen Thomas reported from Cairo: “U.S. President Bill Clinton arrived in Egypt on his historic peace mission in an exuberant mood Wednesday, even as aides played down the possibility of a major breakthrough on the Syrian front.” I’d found my proof. It had taken all of half an hour.
There was the question of how the book landed in my hands, which was also easily answered. Thomas was from Detroit; when she passed away in 2013, her ashes were buried there. I’d purchased the book from ThriftBooks Motor City. Then there was her life and career to discover—who was this person whose literary ponderings I had innocently inherited? Helen Thomas was universally revered and beloved among U.S. presidents from Kennedy to Obama, holding the longtime privilege of a front-row seat at White House press briefings (although she was moved to the back row under W.). She was blunt, tough, exacting. She took to closing presidential press conferences with a trademark line: “Thank you, Mr. President.” In 2010, Thomas drew scrutiny for comments made regarding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” she said. Facing widespread criticism and accusations of antisemitism, she retired suddenly, and the controversy followed her for the remainder of her life.
That’s about as far as I flew with Helen Thomas. The enchantment faded after a few days, albeit long ones (What a year this week has been, etc.). I put down Ghosh’s book and I didn’t pick it up again. The semester was moving on, and I had things to do. I had other books to read. I had papers to write and reviews to edit. There were Zoom seminars to attend and virtual office hours to arrange. (“How are you? What are you doing to take care of yourself right now? Is there anything I can do to support you?”) There were calls to make and texts to send—every day—to friends in the city and parents upstate (“Hey, texted X last night and haven’t heard back...do you know if he’s ok?”). I refreshed my Twitter timeline and stared at the ceiling. I developed chronic pressure in my chest, painful and unrelenting, a condition I’d not experienced since high school, which was one afternoon so severe that I had to shut off my camera in my middle of a class and lie on the floor of my bedroom, breathing slow. I read a photo essay in the Times one night before bed—a mistake.
The lie of exceptionalism laid bare on a Brooklyn sidewalk, the remainder nothing more than bare life. Enchantment be damned.
In another universe, this might have been a different essay. I might have reflected on what my “Used - Good” book had to say to me about materiality and archive, about intimacy and distance, in the midst of a global pandemic. I might have found it significant that Ghosh’s book is a chronicle of the Indian writer’s own archival encounter with a twelfth-century Jewish merchant and his Indian ‘slave and business agent’; Ghosh’s travels to Egypt as a doctoral student in the ‘80s—bookended by the Iraq-Iran and Gulf Wars—to retrace their steps; and his discovery that “the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago.” Maybe I would have wondered at the fact that Thomas chose this book to read on a flight to Cairo in 1994, where President Clinton was to begin a “historic mission” to bring peace to the Middle East. I’d have questioned if there was something to be learned from her annotations: Why had she starred that line I quoted above? Where was she thinking of when she’d written, “How I feel @ [illegible] / 3 yrs since I visited / 41/2 yrs since I lived”? And what of the fact that now, looking back, I see that she and I have both marked one sentence in particular, decades collapsed in a single ink-and-graphite impression on the page: “the lassitude of homecoming mixed with a quiet sense of dread”?
So perhaps, If I were a more attentive and diligent student of literature, I might have written that essay. But I’m not feeling particularly attentive and I don’t have the energy for diligence. I am tired, all the time. My eyes hurt from the hours staring at my phone, my computer, my phone again. I still take walks in the morning and evening, but there’s something desperate about them now, an obligation, the difference between a good day and a lost one. The golf course is open again. Sometimes, we’ll breach it to watch the sunset—such a small beauty, such a simple gift. A man in khakis yells at us to get out of the way.
I might have used that essay to say something meaningful about a presidential election, and I may even have ended it with something quippy and cute (Thank you, Mr. President). But quippy and cute feel insufficient to the task, or incommensurate with the facts, and besides, I’m not in the mood for cleverness and I’m not interested in searching for meaning where there’s none to be found.
I want to open a book and breathe it in, to inhale its scent and brush my fingers against its yellowed pages. I want to crawl inside its fragile spine and fall out the other side, into a seat several miles above the earth. I want to turn to the stranger next to me and feel their slow breath on my face and smile: Going or coming?
Ph.D. Student Coyote Shook Wins Florida Review Chapbook Contest
Please join us in congratulating Ph.D. student Coyote Shook for winning The Florida Review's 2020 Leiby Chapbook Contest for their graphic memoir, "Coyote the Beautiful"! Shook's chapbook will be released in Spring 2021.
Last year's winner Lynne Nugent has this to say about "Coyote the Beautiful": "This visually inventive and emotionally compelling graphic memoir recounts the experiences of a queer writer navigating a fatphobic society and the slights both outright and subtle that have accumulated throughout their life, including gastric bypass surgery and its complications. Interwoven with references to Talullah Bankhead, Emily Dickinson, My Fair Lady, and other cultural touchstones, this memoir indicts a society that demands conformity to beauty standards at any cost. Coyote the narrator is cultured, funny, defiant—someone who is a delight to spend time with.”
read more here
Announcing Assemblages of Empire: An American Studies Symposium
Hosted by Graduate Students in the Department of American Studies
The University of Texas, Austin
March 4-5, 2021
From Octavia Butler’s Anyanwu shifting between bodies, gender, and species in antebellum Louisiana to Jasbir Puar’s discourses on “assemblages,” “America” does not fit easily into a single, definable category. Conversations in American humanities, sciences, and culture frequently center around this lack of a singular “box” in which to fit the vastness of American Studies research. Similarly, the far-reaching and frequently violent impact of American Empire is expansive and likewise not easily contained. This American Studies symposium hopes to examine the shifting, daunting, and changeable “borders” of American Studies through a range of interdisciplinary research.
Rooted in American Studies, this conference invites projects from a range of disciplines and methods that take up questions of American “assemblages,” which should be broadly and creatively interpreted. We are looking for papers, roundtable discussions, and projects that specifically examine such innovative questions, particularly from Black studies, Asian American Studies, Pacific Studies, Indigenous Studies, Latin American Studies, Latino/Chicano/a/x studies, critical disability studies, women’s and gender studies, and LGBTQIA+ studies perspectives. Similarly, projects that examine interdisciplinary topics such as food studies, speculative fiction and nonfiction, sound studies, performance studies, environmental humanities would be enthusiastically welcome.
We likewise encourage non-traditional research, including visual and performing art, comics, photographs, creative nonfiction, social justice projects, recipes, films, sound recordings, etc.
Due to the uncertainty of COVID 19 and in a spirit of accessibility, this conference will be an entirely digital event. Disability, income, and other factors that might inhibit in-person travel to Austin will in no way prevent or hinder equitable participation.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words for papers, roundtables, or projects, a 1-2 page CV, and any necessary accommodations to utamsconference@gmail.com no later than December 31, 2020. If you are proposing a roundtable or a paper/project with multiple collaborators, please send all collaborators’ names and CVs in the same email.
AMS Professor Dr. Lauren Gutterman Co-Wrote Jezebel Article
Check out AMS faculty member Dr. Lauren Gutterman’s Jezebel article, co-authored with Dr. Gillian Frank, detailing the 1960s “girl-watching" cultural phenomenon and the feminist resistance it garnered. Dr. Gutterman and Dr. Frank also host the podcast "Sexing History," which can be found at sexinghistory.com.