The Praxis of Care: Carceral Disruptions and Community Resistance
FAIN: RZ-300086-24
Colby College (Waterville, ME 04901-8840)
Catherine Besteman (Project Director: November 2023 to present)
Research and writing leading to a co-authored book that examines the experience of incarceration and caring for inmates in Maine and Massachusetts. (32 months)
Mass incarceration is a broken, harmful, and criminogenic system. Its stated goal of creating safe communities is undermined by how it disrupts the very caring relationships that undo harm. Knowledge of how carceral systems criminalize care and how people nonetheless resist already exists within communities of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and their loved ones. This project captures that knowledge and shapes it into an edited volume titled, The Praxis of Care: Carceral Disruptions and Community Resistance. The project team includes people with expertise formed through direct experience and scholarly research. Through narrative analysis, oral histories, story-telling, feminist ethics, philosophical theories of the self, restorative practice, and deep personal experience of our team and collaborators, we show how a humanities-based critique of carcerality can build a transformative theory of care relevant to research on prisons and world-making in oppressive contexts.