Literacy, pedagogy, and prisons: Tracing power in higher education in prison contexts

Prisons across the world are manifested by—and themselves manifest— racial capitalism, ableism, and cisheteropatriarchy. At the same time, education, both on the outside and on the inside, is positioned as a key solution to the crises of mass incarceration. More specifically, higher education in prison (HEP) programs are often billed as liberatory and/or transformative (Hartnett et al., 2011; Olinger et al., 2012; Berry, 2018; Evans, 2018; Ahmed et al., 2019; Ginsburg, 2019). The aims of education and prisons are, to say the least, knotted and commingled in paradoxical ways—education in prison, itself, even more so. Yet to paraphrase Harney and Moten (2013), the university not only produces incarceration but also plays a vital role in the social control of minoritized and multiply minoritized people. These tensions among the university, the prison, and college-in-prison animate the heart of this dissertation. As each of these institutions is driven by the e carceral logics of punishment, control, and obfuscation, both research and teaching in college-in-prison contexts must account for the hegemony of the university—a truth that is too often ignored in writing studies and HEP scholarship. This research divests from all-too-straightforward narratives about the role of higher education as an antidote to mass incarceration. By doing so, it connects individual and institutional scales of both the university and the prison by exploring the literacy, teaching, and learning experiences of 15 college-in-prison educators. In tracing how these individuals navigate carceral logics of control in prison and university contexts alike, this project argues that education and writing studies researchers should attend to how instructors navigate state power in order to create more just learning spaces on the inside and outside.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Middleton, Logan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mortensen, Peter
• Cisneros, Josue D
• Wisniewski, Carolyn
• Castro, Erin

• Prison education
• literacy

Statement dc:rights

• © 2022 Logan Middleton

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115494

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115494