Media Production of Prison Communities

Descripción del proyecto

Amplificar las voces de las comunidades penitenciarias

Las prisiones están por todas partes en la cultura popular, pero rara vez se oyen las voces de las personas encarceladas. El proyecto WALLS2BRIDGES, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, explora cómo los presos, sus familias y los activistas contra la prisión utilizan la escritura, las imágenes y el sonido para resistir al estigma e imaginar enfoques alternativos a la justicia. El proyecto, centrado en Francia, Turquía, Reino Unido y Estados Unidos, países en los que el encarcelamiento masivo afecta profundamente a las comunidades minoritarias, estudia los medios de comunicación producidos por las personas más directamente afectadas por los sistemas penitenciarios. Examina cómo las personas que viven bajo vigilancia utilizan los medios de comunicación para expresarse, conectarse y participar, y se pregunta si los medios pueden apoyar sociedades más seguras y justas como recurso comunitario compartido y no como herramienta de control.

Objetivo

Incarceration is widely depicted in films, TV, and the news, but prison communities—imprisoned people, their families, and anti-prison activists—are seldom recognized as media producers. Developing a transnational, collaborative, and comparative model of media justice, this project examines textual, visual, and sound media created by prison communities. It focuses on France, Turkey, the UK, and the US, where racial and ethnic discrimination stimulated mass incarceration of minorities from the mid-1960s, which marks the start of global mass incarceration and widescale prison revolts. The transhistorical and multimedia project attends to diverse prison environments and communities and their differential access to media.

This study is grounded in three topics fundamental to media, its place in society, and its function in human relations today: media and surveillance, media and the senses, and media and justice. The research questions it addresses are: a) What are the subversive uses of media by people who commonly experience them as tools of surveillance? b) How does the experience of imprisonment impact different sensory strategies and engagements with media? c) How can media provide a space of safety and justice for underprivileged communities?

WALLS2BRIDGES is groundbreaking in three ways. Theoretically, by bringing together media, literature and art studies, criminology, and racial and ethnic studies, it is innovative in approaching prison communities as media producers who resist stigmatization and marginalization. Methodologically, by integrating multimethod research (archival research, epistolary ethnography, fieldwork, media design, netnography, textual and audiovisual analysis), it maps historical and multimedia strategies for marginalized self-expression. Substantially, by opening a debate on media justice for communities in oppressive environments it engages in broader debates on social inclusion and equality.