Showing 1 - 2 of 2 Items
Who We Are: Incarcerated Students and the New Prison Literature, 1995-2010
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Reilly Hannah N Lorastein
Access: Open access
- This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring poetry, essays, fiction, and visual art created by incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program at San Quentin State Prison. By engaging the first person perspective of the incarcerated subject, this project will reveal how incarcerated individuals describe themselves, how they maintain and create intimate relationships from behind bars, and their critiques of the criminal justice system. From these readings, the project outlines conventions of “the incarcerated experience” as a subject position, with an eye toward further research analyzing the intersection of one's “incarcerated status” with one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Chambers of Reflection: Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Self-Government in the Digital Age
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: John Sweeney
Access: Open access
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville each warn that the dominant cultures of their days may hinder the project of self-government. Against the backdrop of advancing Enlightenment philosophy, Rousseau writes that as social visibility increases relative to intimate connection, the drive for recognition corrupts self-love. Following the American and French revolutions, Tocqueville explores the democratic erosion of social hierarchies. He writes that a rise in individualism may obscure “self-interest well-understood”—the perspective gained through collaboration with others, thoughtful reflection, and reverence for truths that lie beyond the dictates of cursory instincts. In this project, I apply these political theories to the Digital Age. I explain how the distinction between the physical world and the digital realm has actualized Rousseau’s depiction of double men, “always appearing to relate everything to others and never relating anything except to themselves alone.” In the era of social distancing, technological evolution threatens to induce regression in the sociability and reflective agency that promote our capacity for self-government. Accordingly, I argue that Rousseau’s theory of corrupted drive for recognition and Tocqueville’s theory of individualism inform a new danger to political freedom: digital tribalism.