Research

The era of mass incarceration has been associated with the idea of “law and order,” referring to the carceral regime in which politicians exploited public anxieties over crime and funneled resources into policing and prisons. As important as this system has been and remains to be, there has been a shift in recent years shaped by neoliberalism—the political, economic, and sociocultural program that has supplanted liberal democratic legal frameworks, subordinating them to operations of the market and mandating that private entities intervene in the creation, interpretation, and enforcement of law. While courts and legislatures play a significant role in shaping legal personhood in the neoliberal United States, private, profit-driven institutions are increasingly responsible for determining the post-sentence consequences that people with criminal convictions face. The result has been a move from the courtroom to the boardroom, from a law-and-order society to a policy-and-order society.

Based loosely on the events surrounding the murder of Iowa farmer John Hossack in 1900, Susan Glaspell’s 1916 play Trifles takes place during the investigation into the murder of the fictionalized Hossack, John Wright. While lawmen investigate the crime scene, the wives of the sheriff and a neighbor remain in the kitchen to collect the belongings of Wright’s wife, Minnie, the suspected murderer. They stumble upon evidence that points to her domestic abuse, and the critical consensus about Trifles vis-a-vis this evidence is threefold: 1) Minnie Wright’s abuse is motive for murder; 2) the women believe, based on this evidence, that Minnie Wright did indeed kill her husband; and 3) they knowingly tamper with, destroy, and cover up this evidence, thus serving, per the title of Glaspell’s short story based on the same events suggests, as a jury of Minnie Wright’s peers. This article argues that the women never render a verdict. Instead, their embodied experience of the home draws them towards certain objects. As they encounter these objects, they use gossip to piece together the material and psychic conditions of Minnie Wright’s life. The play is thus not only about the women’s superior reasoning capabilities as a critique of law but a meditation on the feminine use of language whose ambiguity is a constitutive feature of the space women occupy as subjects split between the legal and domestic spheres. 

On the morning of 7 August 2019, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed search warrants at seven agricultural processing plants across Mississippi. This essay examines how left-of-center media reporters and commentators responded to these raids and the state’s criminalization of migrant workers in their aftermath. These responses focused largely on the moral or ethical implications of detaining, arresting, and deporting the migrant workers involved in the case, often by crafting a tightly woven image of the innocence of these particular migrants and, even more so, of their children. As a result, public discourse about the politics of immigration enforcement and its relationship to criminality and citizenship were reduced to an ostensibly apolitical and ideologically neutral appeal that cannot be contested: to protect children. The innocence of children was also coupled with the giddy criminalization of those who “torture” them, namely Donald Trump. These dual constructions—an innocence that marks one as socially valuable and a criminality that marks one as monstrous—produce a moral absolutism that undermines an otherwise rational political whose core tenets are diversity and multiculturalism: outrage and grievance directed against criminality, even when aimed at political enemies, upholds the moral foundations of racist and xenophobic hatred that has been used to justify the disproportionate policing, surveillance, and incarceration of people of color. 

Beginning in the late 1960s a series of reforms saw the emergence of vast numbers of bureaucratic instruments meant to standardize the care, custody, and control of inmates. Grievance and disciplinary procedures were largely homogenized to ensure inmates’ protection from the abuses that were prevalent especially in the southern plantation model of incarceration. These same procedures, however, resulted in the increasing removal of prisoners from the sphere of legal, judicial, and, more broadly, public discourse and oversight. This article analyzes how the failure to prosecute crimes committed inside the prison functions to diminish the legal and political standing of both criminal and victim. In handling crime as an extrajudicial matter, adjudicated exclusively by disciplinary boards, the prisoner-criminal and prisoner-victim are positioned as quasi-legal subjects, bearing neither the rights nor responsibilities of citizenship. The prison, therefore, is a model institution for downsizing citizenship, and its disciplinary procedures are an ideal model for the neoliberalization of public institutions.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro continues to inform the contemporary disciplines of sociology, geography, and criminology. This essay explores how Du Bois’s study of the social and geographical organization of Philadelphia’s black residents was informed by prison reform discourse of the period. Founded in Philadelphia in 1787, the Pennsylvania Prison Society is among the oldest and most influential prison reform organizations in American history. By reading The Philadelphia Negro alongside Du Bois’s earlier and contemporary writings about the sociology of race as well as some of the principal insights disseminated by the Pennsylvania Prison Society, the essay demonstrates how racial and criminal identities performed in and through space respond to dominant ideologies about race and the institutions that uphold them.

This paper was awarded the Journal of Historical Geography Best Essay of the Year Prize for 2018.

In 2004 and 2005, fifteen indictments brought against corrections staff at the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for charges related to sexual misconduct with women inmates. These essay grapples with this "sex scandal" by addressing the complexities of the relationships---romantic and otherwise---that developed at the jail between inmates and staff members. I theorize the jail as a space in which inmates co-construct queer logics of sex, sexuality, work, play, and leisure that disrupt the boundaries between inside and outside. I look at the transactional nature of sex in the case of institutional sexual assault, and explore how inmates might participate in prostitution and other forms of hustling as modes of resistance to the heteropatriarchal and capitalist injunctions to work hard and live for the future.

In 1987, fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley was discovered in a garbage bag in her Poughkeepsie-area neighborhood, covered in dog feces and racial slurs. In the months that followed, a number of men were accused of abducting and raping her. Brawley never made any public statements or testified under oath about her alleged kidnapping and sexual assault, but after a grand jury found in 1988 that no crime had been committed against her, one of her alleged attackers sued her for defamation and the intentional infliction emotional distress. This essay analyzes the Brawley affair in the context of that civil trial, in which the plaintiff was awarded damages not for the actions Brawley supposedly committed as a teenager, but for her failure in the intervening years both to apologize for her alleged hoax and to acknowledge the Court’s authority over her. I examine the notions of publicity and privacy in the Brawley affair, both during the trial and in the intervening years. 

In 2017 and 2018, I led a multidisciplinary research and curriculum design team in the development and refinement of a new, competency based academic program. During the spring and summer of 2018, this team led the redesign of the program’s twenty cross-cutting, discipline agnostic competencies and developed representative assessment protocols. I also led the design of several individual courses, focusing on the scaffolding of core competencies across the four-year curriculum. This team also developed several research projects based on the redesign. One centered on our modifications to Bloom’s Taxonomy for design-centered, competency-based learning, and I was the lead author on a project that focused on the cultivation of student praxis through the integration of habits of mind into the curriculum. Both of these were published in 2020 in the edited volume, A New Focus for Learning: Educational Technology Beyond Content.