Racial Capitalism and Carceral State

The Racial Capitalism and Carceral State working group, now in its eighth year, brings together graduate students and faculty engaged in diverse disciplinary research on historical regimes of mass incarceration, policing, surveillance, immigration detention, and empire. We meet fortnightly to read and discuss foundational texts, broadly constituted and democratically decided by our membership at the start of each semester, in carceral studies and contemporary social movements with working group members alternating leadership and logistical responsibilities. As part of an underlying commitment to ethical and methodological integrity, we aim to support the scholarship and work of currently and formerly incarcerated people, and we regularly host academics and activists involved in prison abolition and related social justice movements.