In all honesty, I never critically looked at the issues of incarceration and carcerality until I became a student at the University of Michigan. I am currently wrapping up my sophomore year as an undergraduate student studying sociology and I had the opportunity to apply for the DCC project through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) here at UM. After writing an essay about the criminalization of black bodies for my intro to english class in my first semester at UM, my professor emailed me a flyer for a symposium series put on by The Carceral State Project and I decided to attend a few of the roundtable discussions. I was taken aback by what a lot of the panelists had to say throughout the symposiums because a lot of it was new information to me. When I applied to the DCC project, I did so because I hope to attend law school once I graduate, but I now realize that this research has been valuable to me far beyond recognizing career aspirations.
As a member of the Community Organizations Documenting Project team, my colleagues and I have worked on constructing StoryMaps as an accessible online source of information regarding the carceral state. The integral backbone of our StoryMaps are videos of panelists from the aforementioned symposium series held at UM in the 2018-2019 school year. We quasi-transcribed the symposia series, clipped over one hundred video segments, tagged these digestible video clips with their pertaining themes, and further condensed these themes into broader topics which we then based our StoryMaps off of. This work has come with some challenges including effectively targeting our audiences, deciding what platform is the best for disseminating our research, and recognizing what ethical guidelines we must abide by whilst constructing our StoryMaps. This essay expands on these questions we as a research team have mulled over this year.
The Community Organizations team has done research under the impression that our audiences are very broad but that they consist of scholars and community members in general. This has been a discussion point for us because we are trying to structure our information so it can be easily understable for everybody even if they have they do not know the basic concepts of the carceral state, but not too heavy on explanation because we don’t want to drown out the voices of the community partners from the panels. Community members and scholars are critical to our work because they make up the panelists whose videos we’ve been dissecting and stringing together into StoryMaps. Some of the panelists are in academia such as the moderators and professors, but many are activists, formerly incarcerated people, family and friends of incarcerated people, those with careers in which they often come into contact with the carceral state, etc. and many of these identities intersected at times. These audiences are critical because they inform our research but they also can benefit from learning more from the DCC project.
As for platforms, we are working on StoryMaps but there a number of ways to reach our targeted audiences. We have been meditating on the idea of podcasts to pull together certain themes we’ve seen in the panels. We hope that future research members, if not us, can create these podcasts that would be similar to the Story Maps we’ve curated but not exactly the same. Our vision for the podcasts is that they will focus even more on the voices of the symposium panelists, including both audio clips from the panels themselves but also additional interview audio of panel guests, with some narration to provide context and introduce the speakers. Overall, research that is not restricted to only university affiliated websites or that which is behind paywalls is crucial. When it comes to disseminating our research, it’s important that it’s not just going to be heavy text because that is not accessible nor the best way to reach our audiences. Our end goal of creating a website with all of the component team’s research, including our StoryMaps, is brilliant to me because it is an outlet that is both accessible and effective.
One ethical concern that the Community Organizations team recognizes is our position as researchers and our role when it comes to highlighting the voices of panelists instead of taking over the StoryMap spotlight. Something we’ve talked about in UROP seminars, which are separate from the DCC project, is being aware of your own identity when working with others and when conducting research, so recognizing the limitations of our own knowledge while working on the DCC project is important. Letting the panelists speak for themselves and being cognizant of our own role when it comes to creating these StoryMaps is a process that has been really important to the Community Organizations team. In this project, it is the panelists who have expertise on the carceral state and this expertise is what we try to put at the forefront.
Prioritizing community knowledge is a huge part of this project as a whole especially in our individual work as the community organizations team. The panels from last year are largely based on community knowledge so it is crucial that our team highlights this and does not drown it out with too many numbers or facts. In terms of collaborating as a research team, we do a lot of peer editing to make sure the StoryMaps are both understandable and that the content that we add is relative to the videos of the panelists and the ideas they bring up. We are hoping that through peer editing and having multiple sets of eyes on everything we produce that we can effectively reach scholars, community members, and everyone in between.
