Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab

Building the United States' first archive to center the political ideas and movement-building of incarcerated individuals

Incarcerated mothers visit with their families at a Christmas party at Rikers Island. Photo by Viviane Moos/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

Process

How are we conducting this work?

Collaborative Process

The archive will be created through partnerships with (1) organizers and artists who have lived experience with the prison system and (2) organizations that are led by people who have lived experience.

Concrete Goal

To produce a living archive of oral history interviews with organizers, activists, and artists who are directly impacted by incarceration, particularly long-term incarceration.

Broad Impact

To create an archive that can serve as go-to source material for community members, organizers, journalists, and researchers to access histories of how directly impacted communities have contested the carceral state and offered new visions for achieving freedom and justice.

To facilitate opportunities where directly impacted individuals and organizations can access and use the source material to create independent content to intervene public discourse.

To learn more about our collaborators, check out who we are and partners.

Timeline

Assemble and adapt the needed forms (interview protocol, consent form), procedures and partnerships (data management procedures, partnerships with organizations, and archival agreement partnerships), and personnel (interviewers, audit-editors) needed to launch the project across multiple sites; conduct 25 oral history interviews; issue up to 5 seed grants.
Establish of the website and a web presence; conduct an additional 75 oral history interviews; provide 10 seed grants to project participants and the commission of up to two creative projects
Conduct an additional 100 oral history interviews; award an additional 10 seed grants to project participants to launch independent projects, commission additional creative works for public exhibition and/or the website, provide continued support to our partner organizations who will interview participants and engage local communities in the oral history project.