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  • The Manifesto Assignment:Study with Women Prisoners
  • Lisa Jean Moore (bio)

It was a chilly October evening.1 There were leaves swirling outside the classroom windows, grazing the barbed wire and chain link fences. We hunkered down in our seats because the heat hadn't yet been turned on inside our prison classroom. Standing in front of the class, Molly2 reached the crescendo of her manifesto and tilted her head. Bundled up in layers of clothes, we were rapt, hanging on her every word. She instructed us to turn to the person nearest and look her in the eye. Grabbing the edges of the desk, Molly continued: "Deep into their eyes. And when I say, 'Whose lives matter?' take a breath in and you say to her, 'Your life matters.'" Around the room, women turned to one another. "Whose life matters?" Molly forcefully asked. Looking into Kelly's slightly bloodshot brown eyes, Michelle stated, "Your life matters." Simultaneously, Kelly pointed at her seatmate Michelle, "Yours Michelle." Other women repeated the phrase to one another throughout the classroom. Molly nodded, "That's right!" We all applauded and cheered, prompting the two service dogs3 to frantically wag their tails. Beyond my grandest expectations, this assignment, the result of wrestling with the limitations of teaching in a maximum-security prison, produced a sensational and moving experience of sociological pedagogy for both the students and me.

Participatory action research into college programs like Bedford Hills College Program (BHPC) consistently reveals positive outcomes, including personal transformation and civic engagement as well as lower re-incarceration rates after release (Fine et al.). Yet conducting this type of research is not without significant challenges. Jane Maher, a writing professor with sixteen years' experience at Bedford Hills, aptly summarizes the mundane experiences of teaching at the prison. There are

the security protocols that seem to change arbitrarily depending on which officer is on duty; the background checks and fingerprinting and annual tuberculosis testing; the rules and regulations about what and who can go in and out and when this can occur; the automatic gates and concertina wire and hand stamping and searching of belongings and head counts; the lack of the most basic necessities such as copy [End Page 115] and fax machines; the inability to e-mail students; the inability to look something up on the Internet during a class conversation; the inability to lend a pen to a student if she has forgotten hers, because the pen has a spring in it (80).

Other sociologists have offered that teaching in a total institution like prison brings to life the overarching bureaucracy of social institutions that Max Weber called the iron cage of rationality (Parrotta and Thompson). Prison, more than other institutionalized spaces of higher learning, severely curbs the possibilities for Weberian enchantment, that is, social interactions outside the rigid rationalization of space and time. As geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (228) has noted, we live in carceral times that put ''half the population into prisons so the other half can make money watching them.'' And this incarcerated population is increasingly female. Ethnic studies scholar Julia Chinyere Oparah (also known as Julia Sudbury) has tracked the new global economy of prison expansion fueled by criminalizing black women (Gilmore; Sudbury). For black girls, criminalization begins well before imprisonment. In her multi-year study of black girls in America, Monique Morris found that although black girls are only 16 percent of the student population, they make up a third of all school arrests. The school-to-prison pipeline is driven by economic insecurity, lack of culturally competent curriculum, and blatant stereotyping of black children (Morris). And I am not outside of this economic nexus of incarceration and education: I make money by teaching students in prison, and I gain opportunities for professional capital such as this very article.

My own feminist pedagogy informed by my reading of feminist scholars demands this kind of rigorous reflexivity (see Alexander; hooks). It also requires the dynamic practice of teaching as an integration of deeply concentrated embodied and sensory practices of listening, engaging, and connecting. As Jacqui Alexander suggests, this type of feminist pedagogy is one that requires creative and collaborative solutions...

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