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The Abolition Of Care: An Engaged Ethnography Of The Progressive Jail Assemblage, Justin Helepololei
The Abolition Of Care: An Engaged Ethnography Of The Progressive Jail Assemblage, Justin Helepololei
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted with prison abolitionists and criminal justice reform activists in Western Massachusetts - a context in which the sheriffs who operate county jails see themselves as reformers. I use the concept of a “progressive jail assemblage” to analyze the varied actors and logics that sustain incarceration locally, focusing especially on the use of care discourses and practices. I consider how progressive jailing puts prison abolitionists in the position of being against some forms of care. At the same time, abolitionists have put forth competing notions of care, ones they see as building a world …
A Papered Freedom: Self-Purchase And Compensated Manumission In The Antebellum United States, Julia Bernier
A Papered Freedom: Self-Purchase And Compensated Manumission In The Antebellum United States, Julia Bernier
Doctoral Dissertations
“A Papered Freedom” is a systematic study of how enslaved and self-emancipated African Americans engaged with compensated manumission to become legally free. To do this, I address fundamental issues related to compensated manumission within the United States from the founding era to the fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s. The project works to give voice to the concerns and problems that African Americans faced in their attempts to buy freedom by analyzing how they interacted with different kinds of networks, both social and economic, in the interest of liberation. By accruing different kinds of capital within these networks, African Americans …