Dan Berger: The speculative archive of prison abolition

Monday, March 6, 2023

Noon 1 p.m. PT

USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (ASC), 207


Prison is more than a place of punishment: it is also a site of knowledge production. From sentencing reports and parole files to lawsuits, the prison is constantly producing and ordering artifacts. It is, in other words, an archive. The archive is shaped both by the government, which oversees prisons, and by incarcerated people themselves, whose diverse forms of resistance generate a parallel counter-archive. This talk explores the archival dimensions of prison, with particular attention to the archives that incarcerated people generate. Through an exploration of the digital archive Washington Prison History Project, Berger shows how abolitionists have turned the conditions of confinement into a space to imagine freedom--a speculative archive.