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.
Articles by Gillian Harkins
\Gillian Harkins is Associate Professor of English and Adjunct Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her Ph.D. in English with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley (2002) and her B.A. in English and Women\'s Studies Departments from Wellesley College (1994). Recent awards include a Society of Scholars Research Fellowship (2012-13) and three Public Humanities Grants on higher education inside prisons (2010-13) from the University of Washington Simpson Center for the Humanities, a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Research Centre for Law, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Kent, England (2008), and a Royalty Research Fund Fellowship at the University of Washington (2005-06). Harkins is the author of Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and co-editor of Special Issues of Social Text on “Genres of Neoliberalism” with Jane Elliott (Summer 2013) and Radical Teacher on “Teaching Inside Carceral Institutions” with Kate Drabinski (Winter 2012). Recent articles include “Access or Justice? Inside-Out and Transformative Education,” Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education, Eds. Simone Davis and Barbara Roswell (Palgrave, 2013), “Virtual Predators: Neoliberal Loss and Human Futures in Mystic River” Social Text (Summer 2013), and “Foucault, the Family and the Cold Monster of Neoliberalism,” Foucault, the Family and Politics, Eds. Leon Rocha and Robbie Duschinsky (Palgrave, 2012). Forthcoming co-authored essays on higher education and the prison industrial complex include “Civic Engagement and Carceral Education: Building Bridges Across the Bars” with Mary Gould and Kyes Stevens for the Special Issue “College in Prison in the Era of Mass Incarceration” of New Directions for Community Colleges, Eds. Rob Scott and Susan Walker. Her new book-in-progress, Screening Pedophilia: Virtuality and Other Crimes Against Nature, examines the emergence of the “pedophile” as virtual image in twentieth and twenty-first century literature, forensics and film. She currently works with three college in prison programs in Washington state.\