Culture Behind Bars:
Humanities and Incarceration
Moderator: Professor Liz Bounds,
Candler School of Theology/Graduate Division of Religion
2015-2016 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar (CHIIRS)
Sponsored by
The Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry
In the United States, about 1 in every 35 adults in the United States, or 2.9% of adult residents, are on
probation or parole or incarcerated in prison or jail, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Prisoners
and detainees in many local, state and federal facilities, confront conditions that are abusive, degrading
and dangerous. Under such conditions, engagement with the humanities, through reading, writing,
artmaking, and/or performance, can be a moment of humanization where persons are affirmed as
human in a profoundly inhuman environment. These encounters expand understanding of the
humanity of humanistic work, enabling new ways of thinking relationships to ourselves, our
communities, and the world in which we live.
This seminar focuses upon the relationship of humanities and confinement as multidimensional and
transformative. The first session will give background on prison education and its effects, and
subsequent sessions will discuss reading practices, writing practices, and performance. Short readings
will include work by incarcerated persons, scholarship on reading and writing practices in prison, and
research on the effects of humanities education in prisons. There will also be video/written accounts of
the work of some creative programs in incarcerated settings in the United Sates. Central to the
conversation will be the ways class, race, gender, and sexuality are visible or invisible, important or
unimportant, in these encounters. Faculty and graduate students will be encouraged to present relevant
portions of their own scholarship and/or teaching experiences.
Open to invited faculty and graduate students, this seminar will meet from 6:30pm-8:30pm at The Fox
Center for Humanistic Inquiry on the following Tuesday evenings during the spring semester: January
26, February 23, March 29 and April 26. For more information, or to reserve a spot, please contact
Professor Bounds at ebounds@emory.edu.
We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its support of this program. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations
expressed in these seminars do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.