The Center for Writing Studies is hosting the 15th annual Gesa E. Kirsch Graduate Research Symposium on April 24th and 25th. This year, Dr. Alexandra Cavallaro is coming to host a workshop and deliver a keynote speech.
Workshop: Paper Trails: Literacy, Incarceration, and Archival Research
This hands-on workshop invites participants to explore the multiple meanings of literacy for people behind bars, using archival texts as a point of entry. We will examine strategies for organizing archival materials for research projects and engage in a collaborative analysis of letters from the LGBT Books to Prisoners archive. The session will conclude with creative exercises designed to generate research questions and open up new interpretive pathways within the archival record.
Keynote: “Something to Connect to and Hope for”: Abolitionist Worldmaking and Queer Literacies in Prison
The rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s in the United States and the many ways that prisons touch our lives have positioned prisons as inevitable—even essential—institutions (e.g., Davis, 2003). Prison abolitionists challenge this norm by offering alternatives that do not rely on prisons to solve social problems and address violence. Drawing from a collection of over 500 letters from the LGBT Books to Prisoners archive, this project examines the many ways that abolitionist literacy practices contribute to envisioning this future. The literacy practices of the incarcerated letter writers, I argue, challenge the ways that incarcerated people are meant to engage and what they are meant to know, allowing for the building of new immaterial and material worlds. These queer immaterial worlds are the textual worlds where queer lives, experiences, and desires exist within the prison system; they are often ephemeral, leaving ghost-like traces as people navigate both the affirming and community-building role of literacy practices in prison, as well as the dangers associated with those same practices. The imaginative practice that these letter writers engage in is essential to the broader work that envisions a more abolitionist future. As acts of worldmaking, these literacy practices have much to teach us about what it means to imagine an abolitionist future, and to practice worldmaking in a world of impossibility.
Other featured events will include an academic job search panel, a Center for Writing Studies graduate reflection panel, and research presentations from graduate students from Linguistics, Informatics, Education, Center for Writing Studies, East Asian Languages & Cultures, and more.
Full itinerary details coming soon!