Residency Interest Group

Please join CAFe on Wednesday, September 18th at 4pm for Doran Lawson's talk on "Archiving the Crisis: What urgency should archivists feel regarding living archives of state-sponsored violence?". 

Doran Lawson, Edward North Professor of Literature, Hamilton College

Start Date:  September 18th, 4PM
End Date: September 18th, 5PM
Location: Virtual, Register Here!

Abstract:
Archives commonly address the sustainable physical holding, digitization, and other ways of creating lasting, accessible repositories of documentation of past and concluded events, albeit often ones with continuing contemporary relevance (e.g. the Tulsa Race Riot).

The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is a growing archive of nearly 4,000 non-fiction essays and poems by people currently incarcerated in the U.S. and since 2009. Fully searchable by author demographics, states, and key words, the APWA receives between 40-100 new written testimonials to prison conditions and experience each month.

This talk, by the APWA's founder and current co-director, will address the stakes and potential of the APWA (and like projects) and the urgency of seeing acts of witness to current instances of state-sponsored violence, neglect, gross incompetence, and willful deprivation brought into public venues in a timely fashion. Fully aware of the hazards for both the witnesses and for their facilitators, and with sharp attention to the need for ethical, non-extractive protocols and practices, this paper will argue that the urgency to respond to first-person witness's aspirations to get their work before the public should not be less than what we might expect from outlets and platforms for those serving first-person witnesses to active war zones-witnesses, that is, who write from desperation both in their current conditions and in their need to move public opinion, direct action, and intervention in ongoing (criminal) abuse and neglect.

The talk will cover the history of the APWA, its potential to move hearts and minds, and-due to this potential-the need to see prison witness disseminated both carefully and expeditiously.

Bio:
Doran Larson is Edward North Professor of Literature at Hamilton College. He led a writing workshop inside Attica Correctional Facility from 2006 to 2016. He is the founding organizer of the AA-degree granting Attica-Genesee Teaching Project, and of the award-winning AA-degree granting Hamilton-Herkimer College College-in-Prison Program at Mohawk and Mid-State Correctional Facilities. He is the author of Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: Discovering the Ethical Prison (2017). He is the editor of Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America (2014), the largest print collection to date of non-fiction essays by currently incarcerated people writing about their experience inside. He founded and now co-directs The American Prison Writing Archive, a Mellon-funded and fully searchable digital archive of over five million words of first-person prison witness. His new book, Inside Knowledge: Incarcerated People on the Failures of the American Prison, was published by NYU Press in January.
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