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FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Biopolitics

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Prison System And The Media: How “Orange Is The New Black” Engages With The Prison As A Normalizing Agent, Eunice Louis Mar 2015

The Prison System And The Media: How “Orange Is The New Black” Engages With The Prison As A Normalizing Agent, Eunice Louis

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to ascertain the ways in which Orange is the New Black uses its platform to either complicate or reify narratives about the prison system, prisoners and their relationship to the state. This research uses the works of Giorgio Agamben, Colin Dayan, Michelle Alexander and Lisa Guenther to situate the ways the state uses the prison and social narratives about the prison to extend its control on certain populations beyond prison walls through police presence, parole, the war on drugs and prison fees.

From that basis, this work argues that while Orange does challenge some …


Life In The Penit: Framing And Performing Miami's Graffiti Subculture, Victor M. Merida Mar 2014

Life In The Penit: Framing And Performing Miami's Graffiti Subculture, Victor M. Merida

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the tradition of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, this thesis focuses on Miami’s graffiti subculture and the conflicts between market economies and economies of social meaning. As a reference point, I consider Miami’s “Penits”: the name given to the seemingly abandoned buildings where graffiti is performed. Short for penitentiary, the term derives from the 1980s after a large building rumored to be a prison was defunded midway through its construction. After this first reclamation, every other graffiti heterotopia in Miami has been similarly recoded as spaces that mock structures of discipline and industry.

Through Michel Foucault’s biopolitical framework …