WALLS2BRIDGES · Media Production of Prison Communities

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.