Lateral’s Theory Thread offers essays that critically explore the relationship of carceral and educational institutions—but not as alternatives to one another as often has been assumed in various kinds of social activism. The authors of these essays, Sora Han, David Stein, Shana Agid, Gillian Harkins and Erica R. Meiners, assume the tightly knotted interrelationship of prisons and schools and instead address the question posed by Han: is there something, being affirmed in the identity or identification as a “prison abolitionist” today?
Special Sections
Special sections published within or across issues.
Abolition: At Issue, In Any Case
Toward what does the “prison abolitionist” identity or identification strive? This thread is organized primarily around Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s essay, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” And we think there is not a better place to begin staging the relation between abolition and that to which we refer as “teaching”, with all the compromised valences such work can carry given the state of the educational system today. Indeed, as if to answer the above question about whether there is something affirmed by prison abolitionism, Moten and Harney seem to answer “yes”, there is something. In this essay, I would like to explore this “yes” as it emerges in Moten and Harney’s essay, and how it might unfold in how we imagine our engagements with law.
Making Anyway: Education, Designing, Abolition
This essay aims to raise some provocations and questions about the practice of attempting to teach abolition in universities and colleges that are embracing the notion of the duty of the university to the “community,” and pursuing the deep institutionalization of “civic engagement” curricula and programs, all while offering the promise of an opportunity to “do good” (and do well – i.e., still get a job).
Full Employment for the Future
Who deserves what types of entitlements? On what grounds? In this moment of rampant and structural joblessness, there is an increasing critique of universities for their failure to create appropriate routes to employment for their graduates who are borrowing increasing sums of money to attend. Do these good students, who make, what President Obama has dubbed “good choices,” deserve jobs? If so, why only them? Or, with the extreme wealth of the U.S., should these good students, along with the bad, and everyone else, be entitled to a job or income? And what do employment rates for undergraduates have to do with the university anyway?
Beyond Crisis: College in Prison through the Abolition Undercommons
This thread explores inter-relationships among institutions of higher education and prisons. We focus in particular on teaching and learning – the hallmarks of college in prison programs – as they relate to research and administration within and across universities/colleges and prisons. Our aim is to contribute to broader structural thinking about how we can work in college in prison programs most ethically and in ways that contribute to prison abolition within and across campus and prison settings.
Presidential Plenary 2013
Presidential Plenary at Cultural Studies Association 2013 Conference. Introduction by CSA President Bruce Burgett with responses to the prompt, “Cultural studies should be…,” by Rob Gehl, Christina Nadler, Jamie Skye Bianco, Megan Turner, and Stephen J Luber.
Cultural Studies Should Be… Unsettled
Bruce Burgett, the CSA president, asked CSA members to contribute to the plenary by responding to this prompt:
Cultural Studies should…
Cultural Studies is…
Cultural Studies could…
I approached this with my own idiosyncratic biography, anxieties, and hopes in mind.
Undisciplined
Cultural studies should be a political act against the institutionalizing processes of becoming disciplined
Q3C
Cultural Studies would, could, should, must, will, and does begin queerly in the middle of things.
Queer
Creative
Critical
Compositionism
Academic
Cultural studies should be a deliberate site of sustained and sustainable struggle.
Cultural Studies Should Gamify
I’ve created GamifytheCSA.org, an experiment in gamifying the academic conference. Gamifying the CSA will enhance serious play in discourse and practice and expand the scope of the conference, with models in business and social networking with programs such as FourSquare, and extending to health and fitness, with programs such as Zombies, Run!, and the list goes on.
Spontaneous Acts of Scholarly Combustion
The future of academic publishing, as well as its ability to create and sustain publics, rests upon its willingness to take up the protection, maximum use, and enjoyment of “personal energy under personal control. This will also mean understanding that the other critical term here, in addition to freedom, is responsibility. Someone, or some distributive collectives of someones, which might also form a nomadic para-institution, or “outstitution,” needs to take responsibility for securing this freedom for the greatest number of persons possible who want to participate in intellectual-cultural life. A publisher is a person, or a group, or a multiplicity, who is responsible.
Queering the Archive
This CSA plenary talk discusses a performance based on oral histories collected in the author’s book, ‘Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History’
PNAP Talk
This plenary talk discusses the author’s experience working with a college in prison program at Stateville Prison in Illinois.
La Perrouque
Intended for la perruque, Michel de Certeau’s modern-day proletariat, this is a user’s manual that critically examines the intricacies of the academic employment process, from the interview to the chicaneries that one endures during his at-will tenure. And so, this manifesto is not only a creative, autobiographical account of how I have so far tactically revolted or “made do” and am surviving the prodding and churning of the machine, it also is one of many portraits that collectively paint an encouraging picture of human resistance.