EventsCommon Ground#653
Coal, Cages, Crisis: Judah Schept
Featuring Schept, Abby Cunniff, and Jarrod Shanahan
Thursday, September 22, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Author Judah Schept joins Rail contributors Jarrod Shanahan and Abby Cunniff for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Rider Alsop.
Judah Schept
A Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, the work of Judah Schept, Ph.D. is grounded in the interdisciplinary field of Critical Prison Studies. His work examines the history, political economy, and cultural logics of the carceral state. He is the author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia (New York University Press, 2022) and Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion (NYU Press, 2015). He is co-editor of The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books, 2023). His writing can also be found in journals such as Radical Criminology, Punishment & Society, the Boston Review, and others.
Abby Cunniff
A PhD student in environmental studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, the research of Abby Cunniff focuses on the role of prison labor within climate-induced disaster response and mitigation, resting between the fields of climate justice and prison studies.
Jarrod Shanahan
Based in Chicago, Jarrod Shanahan is a writer, activist, and educator. He is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois, and is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso 2022); coauthor of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and the Future of America’s Punishment System (Reaktion Books 2022); a co-editor of Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity (Verso 2022), a Noel Ignatiev reader; and an editor of Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨