Decolonizing Carcerality: Study Group Session 2

Study Group Description: The legacies of colonialism, racial hierarchies and violence, land dispossession, and cultural and societal erasure are all encompassed in what Michel Foucault defines as the carceral; or the ways in which those in power discipline and control those without power. This study group will attempt to decolonize the carceral through the lenses of Indigenous and Black Studies and attempt to put these two distinct yet similar fields in conversation to reflect upon the carceral state and decolonization.

Registration will be first come, first served. This event is only open to HUID holders. Preregistration is required. Please be sure to register separately for each session you plan to attend.

Location/Time

This Study Group will take place over the course of three sessions:

• Session 1: March 5 Wednesday 12pm EST
• Session 2: March 26 Wednesday 12pm EST
• Session 3: April 16 Wednesday 12pm EST

Recommended Reading - Session 2: Carcerality in NA studies and Black studies

• Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe). “Criminal Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land.” Theory & Event 19 (2016).
• Sherene H. Razack. “Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine." Feminist Legal Studies 28 (2020): 1-20.
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad. “The Foundational Lawlessness of the Law Itself: Racial Criminalization & the Punitive Roots of Punishment in America,” Daedalus 151 (2022): 107-120.
• Tajah Ebram. “‘Can’t Jail the Revolution’: Policing, Protest, and the MOVE Organization in Philadelphia’s Carceral Landscape.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 143 (2019): 333-362.

Instructor Bios:

Willie Mack is an Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interests focus on race, immigration, the Cold War, and the carceral state in twentieth-century United States. His manuscript, tentatively titled, With Friends Like These: Transnational Carceral Regimes and Punitive Anti-Communism in Haiti and New York City, takes a transnational approach to the development of the carceral state in Haiti and the U.S. through the lens of Cold War politics, race, and immigration. He is also working on an anthology on Black immigration to the U.S. Will has an article on policing and politics in New York City’s Black communities published with The Journal of Urban History. He has had articles published with “Black Perspectives” the blog for the African Americans Intellectual History Society, the Society for U.S. Intellectual Society, and “Next Chapter,” the digital forum for the University of Chicago’s Race and Capitalism Project. Will is a Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights and a faculty scholar with the University of Missouri’s Michael A. Middleton Center for Race, Citizenship, and Justice.

Liza Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and a 2024-25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. Black is currently completing her book manuscript: How to Get Away with Murder: A Transnational History of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirits. Black is an Associate Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 2020, Black published Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film. Black has received several research grants including the Ford pre-, doc and post-doc fellowships; the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA fellowship; and the Cherokee Nation Higher Education Grant. She serves on council for both the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the Western History Association. She is the Series Editor for Native American Studies at University of Oklahoma Press. She is an invited member of The Police Project at Harvard Kennedy School.