I am a critical criminologist and visual scholar with an interdisciplinary background in the humanities and social sciences. My research derives from over twenty years of fieldwork and teaching in US prisons, working closely with the imprisoned and formerly incarcerated, prison workers, victim survivors, their families, and community organizers at the height of mass incarceration.  It is grounded as well in my own relationships to family members whose lives and deaths were marked by addiction, poverty, and the carceral.  I am a first generation college student – a citizen of Cherokee Nation (Tahlequah, OK) on my father’s side, and from the rural white working poor on my mama’s side. My earlier work chronicles the era of mass incarceration, including the cultural politics of privilege, distance, and accountability in the expansion of the carceral state. I have also worked extensively with image archives (film, television, photographs, internet and new media), artist collectives, and community organizers focused upon countervisual practices and strategies – how we unsee prisons, police, and empires in order to build emancipatory practices and institutions. I use this site as a project space to think with others about our commitments to justice and ways to build power for all.

_{Photo: Caroline Rowcliffe}

Carceral Reckoning and Twenty-First Century Abolition Movements: Generational Struggles in the Fight Against Prisons 

Collaboration with Zhandarka Kurti (States of Incarceration), forthcoming in Punishment & Society. The spectacle of racist state violence in the middle of a global pandemic was the spark that ignited one of the largest Black led and multiracial protest movements in recent history. The George Floyd rebellion propelled abolitionist politics from the margins to the mainstream of American political life. In the span of a few months, abolitionism supplanted liberal visions of reforming the carceral state. While important academic work continues to highlight the social and historical context that produced such widespread resistance to the American punishment regime, very little attention has been paid to how and why abolitionism gained such mainstream acceptance. We argue that the successful mainstreaming of the twenty-first century abolitionist response to the crisis of the carceral state is due to generational and intergenerational experiences of mostly Black and Brown organizers fighting against policing and incarceration. As new abolitionism forces reckonings with the carceral state and its major institutions, through important shifts, methodologies, and newly imagined forms of freedom, these movements necessitate new questions in the study of punishment: What are the tensions and contradictions that twenty-first century abolitionists are contending with as they build intergenerational movements against policing and prisons? How does the abolitionist legacy inform the work that we do as scholars and activists? How does the carceral reckoning realign political education and struggle?  

Special Issue: Toward Black Safety

Available here at Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order. And listen to us on the podcast Black in Appalachia! Building on Black Safety, led by collaborators Dr. Shaneda Destine and Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin, we include work by key scholars and interviews with leading organizers (Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson – Highlander Research and Education Center; Ejeris Dixon of Vision Change Win; and Krystal Leaphart – National Birth Equity Collaborative) to interrogate and challenge “safety.” By centering Black agency, we deconstruct the necropolitics of racialized public safety, carceral safety and white supremacist conceptions of “safety.” We ask, building from El-Amin’s dissertation: What is Black safety and its role conceptually, experientially, culturally, politically in countering the white supremacy of the carceral state?  What do sites of Black safety look like – what do sites of threat to Black safety look like? What is its historical genealogy and foundational relationship to Black place making, movement, and temporality – Where do Black people feel safe and unsafe across time and place?  How does Black safety relate to fugitive forms of Black social life that have attempted to carve out not simply survival, but Black life, agency, and joy in the uninhabitable spaces of white supremacy and carcerality? How too have concerns for Black safety under systems of white supremacy and carcerality occupied and exhausted the lives of Black people? How do Black safety and joy act as insurgent ways of knowing and being that challenge the dominance and justifications of white supremacist and liberal constructions of public and carceral safety? What forms do these ways of Black social life take? And how does approximation to and reproductions of whiteness in Black spaces pose threats to Black safety? 

The Police Call and the Call for Police: Violence Work, Safety, and Abolition

Michelle Brown, Kyra Martinez, and Vivian Swayne

In this project, we give attention to the police call as a key site for law’s violence. We do this while focusing on current and unprecedented efforts in the United States to reduce or end reliance upon the police and criminal justice as singular solutions to safety. The political project of “defunding the police” brings together elements of reform and abolition that are impossible to fully reconcile, demanding a deeper analysis of pathways forward, within and against the law, as communities struggle toward transformation. We seek to illuminate these stakes by providing an analysis of the police call as a form of legal violence and, in its place, outline the needs and possibilities for public services and community resources against the carceral state. We do so through a three-part effort. First, we provide a critical rereading of the function of the police call as a site for law’s violence, noting its absence as such in much of the literature on law and policing.  Next we lay out the role of radical municipal city politics in drawing attention to the police call as violence, with community organizers demanding changes in policing in order to build community power and address key social problems, such as the lack of housing, health care, education, and other basic infrastructural social goods across American cities. Finally, we analyze the empirical reasons that people typically call the police, including a year’s worth of data on police calls in our own community, in order to conceptualize the structural forces and needs animating the police call and possible alternative responses.  In all of this, we engage with how organizers and engaged scholars are imagining solutions and safety in relation to these issues and the structural tensions that arise in those efforts in relation to law’s violence.

Transformative Arts. Board member and collaborator. Transformative Arts, founded by anthropologist, artist, and curator, Jill Moniz, nurtures collective participation in the arts to develop visual literacy that contributes to sustainable communities worldwide. Working always in community, privileging restorative and transformative justice, TA is committed to imprinting the narratives (past and present) of people whose lives, labor and history are often forgotten in the crush of modern life and the power of these communities to amplify individual and collective stories through visual language. Programming, documenting, and community building is ongoing in Évora, Paris and Los Angeles. Our current collaboration investigates freedom-seeking communities and how they articulate, generate, understand and use various languages of liberation – abolition, fugitivity, creative empowerment, and social justice. Bringing together scholars, curators, artists, and activists in freedom movements, this project works with communities to build and sustain liberatory spaces for creative languages.

Image: Transformative Arts.

Studying For Abolition is dedicated to the study of a critical carceral approach to punishment.  It seeks to introduce, elevate, and engage the work of contemporary abolition movements, with a focus on grassroots organizations who advocate for racial and social justice in place of current criminal justice practices in the United States.  New abolitionists seek to transform the culture of punishment and current practices of American criminal justice by speaking out against and generating alternatives to mass incarceration, immigrant detention, capital punishment and various forms of police, state, and legal violence.  Studying for Abolition is a space for students to explore and study community-based education and histories of organizing among those directly impacted by the carceral state; to provide tools and concepts to think about both criminalization and racism; and to promote abolitionist and alternative (i.e., restorative, transformative) configurations of justice and history.  Let’s imagine and build the world we want.

Image: Study. Source: Pete Railand.

Visual Criminology Select Works

Senior Editor: The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media and Popular Culture is a collection of over 120 article-length entries written by an assembly of nearly two hundred leading international scholars. It asks how do people imagine crime and punishment? How do they go about thinking of deviance and reactions to it? To answer this, contributors look at media influences on the ways people think about crime and punishment–influences that include photography, movies, newspapers, detective novels, television, graphic arts, broadsides, myth, paintings, murals, the internet, and social media. It offers a foundational space for understanding the cultural life and imaginative force and power of crime and punishment. All of the articles appear online as part of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology. (Awarded Library Journal’s best reference work of 2018.)

Editor, 2015-2020: Crime Media Culture. A peer reviewed, international journal providing the primary vehicle for exchange between scholars who are working at the intersections of criminological and cultural inquiry. It promotes a broad cross-disciplinary understanding of the relationship between crime, criminal justice, media and culture.

Editor: The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology. The first foundational primer on visual criminology. Spanning a variety of media and visual modes, this volume assembles established researchers whose work is essential to understanding the role of the visual in criminology and emergent thinkers whose work is taking visual criminology in new directions.

Abolition Now: Counter-Images and Visual Criminology. In Abolish Criminology, Eds. M. Coyle, V. Saleh-Hanna, and J. Williams. Forthcoming at Routledge.

Key Documents

UT Faculty Website

Curriculum Vitae

Photo: Archives. Source: Author.