This workshop will prepare Columbia University faculty and graduate students to teach in prison contexts and to contribute to an on-campus Special Concentration in Social Justice. The work will have both theoretical and practical components. We will read texts together that consider the relationship of prison education programs to prison abolition activism; that take up the special pedagogical circumstances that obtain in most prison contexts; and that analyze the imbricated economic structures, racial systems, and carceral formations that challenge social justice initiatives and prove their necessity. We invite participants who already teach in local prisons; those with an interest in doing so; alums of those programs; and faculty and grad students with an interest in developing a roster of campus courses that could contribute to a special concentration in social justice for undergraduates. We welcome those who work in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, sciences, and health fields. The group will decide in the first year what different forms its work will take; much of the second year will be devoted to the collaborative creation of courses and the public presentation of the various aspects of our work.
