Humanities Behind the Walls (HBW)

Humanities Behind the Walls (HBW) draws on a genealogy of situated and subjugated knowledges that have emerged from behind prison walls to provide an opportunity for faculty and students to critically engage the humanistic and humanizing potential inherent in acts of reading and discussing literature, poetry, and drama with people incarcerated at Perryville Women's Prison, and with formerly incarcerated people at Arizona State University. Three components make up the HBW: First, reading circles facilitated by ASU faculty inside Perryville prison and at ASU with formally incarcerated people. Second, by centering the prison industrial complex in the analysis of the relationships between the epistemologies and ways of knowing situated in spaces of unfreedom on the one hand, and the Humanities situated in the university on the other, three seminars and workshops led by interdisciplinary scholars, families, and formerly incarcerated people will convene during the 2012-2013 school year. And third, drawing on successes of Temple University's Inside/Out Program, and the research culled from our attendance at the 2012 Summer Institute at Temple, HBW will convene a group of dedicated scholars to plan and prepare for future funding, and implement an Inside/Out program at Arizona State University.

This project was sponsered by the Institute for Humanities Research.