Graduate Seminar Workshop with BSP Dissertation Fellow Kerry Keith
This presentation focuses on how people inside Pelican Bay State Prison worked within infrastructural-turned-fugitive cracks in the buildings to mobilize for a hunger strike within the racist segregationist forces of long-term solitary confinement in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) in 2011. By 2013, this strike grew into the largest prison resistance movement in the United States with over 30,000 strikers across the state. This presentation dives into the material channels of inter-building and inter-pod communication that undermined carceral control. The strike has most often been analyzed for its legal achievements and limitations which produces a liberal white-washing of the event. I amend this discourse by underscoring the Black radical and New Afrikan impetus of the hunger strike. From this framework, the strike is not merely a means to meet demands, it is the weaponization of self-starvation in a protracted struggle for liberation.
If you plan to attend, please RSVP at bit.ly/bspgradseminar by Monday, January 13, 2025 to help with food orders.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025 | 2:00PM - 3:30 PM (PST)
Public Engagement Building (PEB) 201
Event Details
This presentation focuses on how people inside Pelican Bay State Prison worked within infrastructural-turned-fugitive cracks in the buildings to mobilize for a hunger strike within the racist segregationist forces of long-term solitary confinement in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) in 2011. By 2013, this strike grew into the largest prison resistance movement in the United States with over 30,000 strikers across the state. This presentation dives into the material channels of inter-building and inter-pod communication that undermined carceral control. The strike has most often been analyzed for its legal achievements and limitations which produces a liberal white-washing of the event. I amend this discourse by underscoring the Black radical and New Afrikan impetus of the hunger strike. From this framework, the strike is not merely a means to meet demands, it is the weaponization of self-starvation in a protracted struggle for liberation.
Following the presentation, attendees will have the opportunity to share questions and engage in discussion.