Dissertation
A Lingering Coloniality: Considering the Epistemic and Structural (Im)Possibilities of University-Sponsored Prison Writing Programs
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2014
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/5083
Abstract
Walter Mignolo suggests a fused relationship between modernity and coloniality. I suggest that prison writing sponsorship carries the possibility of this coloniality in the ways that sponsors account for and justify programs. Specifically, I suggest that the way scholars use student texts assumes a modernistic fixity that may not be there. In response to this critique, I provide a theoretical lens for looking at the prison writing classroom that suggests that both the writing communities and the texts they create are inherently organic and might not be measurable, package-able, and exportable in they ways we want them to be.
This remixed theory brings together grammatology, ecosocial theory, and actor network theory, each of which operates on the assumption that a fundamental instability underlies relationships between people and things in their networks. Taken together, these theories help describe the messy, complicated, and contingent work being done by prison writing communities and lead me to assert that such communities stand to lose when program sponsors dictate the type of work being done, and/or require explicit or implicit evidence of transformation from program participants.
Whereas the aforementioned theories work to disrupt a modernistic paradigm for understanding and evaluating prison writing programs, indigenous methodologies open up possible decolonial options for thinking about how we construct, and carry out, acts of sponsorship and research in the prison system. The theory and praxis suggested in this text makes use of the particular history of Arts in Corrections at New Folsom, the maximum-security prison where I have been a guest teacher in the classrooms of two incarcerated teaching artists, both of whom are serving life without parole sentences. In the interplay between theories that speak to the instability of things and methodologies that privilege relationality and relational accountability I offer joining (versus helping or transforming) as a possible posture for scholars interested in the sponsorship and study of out of school writing communities.
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Details
- Title
- A Lingering Coloniality
- Creators
- Anna Plemons
- Contributors
- Patricia F Ericsson (Advisor)Victor Villanueva (Advisor)Kristin L Arola (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- English, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 200
- Identifiers
- 99900581846301842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation