The Carceral State Project launched an initiative at the University of Michigan to encourage and increase collaboration among U-M scholars who are investigating the historical roots, contemporary manifestations, and legal and political debates surrounding mass incarceration, policing, and criminalization broadly defined. We envision an initiative that will sponsor or enhance a broad range of collaborative scholarly projects across multiple departments, and between the U-M campus and community stakeholders. These collaborations will emphasize the production of original scholarship, including work using digital humanities methods and involving public-facing platforms, that connects criminal justice to social justice and has direct public and policy impact. While not primarily a pedagogical initiative, this will include the mobilization of undergraduate and graduate/professional school students in research projects and hands-on fieldwork, both through and beyond formal courses, to investigate historical and contemporary issues of racial and social inequality, criminalization, incarceration, and state power in southeast Michigan and in the nation and world beyond.
5×5 team members include Heather Ann Thompson, Department of History, Department of Afro-American and African Studies; Residential College; Professor, Matt Lassiter, Professor, Department of History; Ashley Lucas, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Drama, Residential College, Director of Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP); Ruby Tapia, Associate Professor, Department of English, Department of Women’s Studies; and Amanda Alexander, Department of Afro-American and African Studies, Michigan Society of Fellows, Law School; Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow.
Designed to spark compelling conversations, 5×5 Incubator Grants bring together small groups of faculty, lecturers, research scientists, librarians, curators, post-docs and other university scholars from a range of fields for a short-term engagement in exploring common interests.