Doctoral Dissertation Research: Networks of Support and Solidarity in Carceral Contexts

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The carceral experience encompasses not only the over two million people currently incarcerated in American prisons, but also those within the broader social, affective, and kin networks with which incarcerated individuals are connected. This doctoral dissertation project seeks to investigate how relationships of solidarity, kinship, and affinity are created, changed, or maintained during imprisonment. In exploring such a question, this research examines how imprisoned people and the people with whom they share close ties manage to build affective networks, bonds of mutuality, and reciprocity within and across prison borders. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project strives to enrich the public's understanding of science and the scientific method by sharing its findings through public-facing venues and organizational dissemination. The project also broadens the participation of historically underrepresented groups in the production of scientific knowledge. A core hypothesis of this research is that incarceration impacts the strength of social bonds among imprisoned people and their social networks in ways that parallel the systematicity of chattel slavery. The doctoral student tests this hypothesis through an in-depth, rigorous analysis of archival sources from historical and contemporary epochs. The researcher will complement these data with twelve months of participant observation and approximately seventy-five semi-structured interviews with interlocutors in two organizations that facilitate communications with incarcerated individuals. Thus, while many generative studies insinuate a link between enslavement and imprisonment in the United States, the present study will be one of the first to test a hypothesis about the link with a scientific and ethnographic eye. In so doing, this doctoral dissertation project advances the ascendant, interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to uncover a usable carceral past in order to better comprehend the scope and scale of the contemporary prison system. The project integrates analysis of archival, sociolegal, and ethnographic data to improve scientific understanding of how people navigate institutional bureaucracies and spatial challenges to forge and maintain affective and kin-based relationships. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.