Call for Proposals: Faculty Spotlight Exhibitions at the IAS
May 29, 2025UC Santa Cruz faculty across the divisions are invited to submit a proposal for an exhibition of their artwork at the Institute...
- This event has passed.
May 13 @ 9:30 am – 5:00 pm
Organized by Pooja Rangan, Visiting Scholar, Visualizing Abolition at University of California, Santa Cruz
Carceral Media Ecologies—and How to Break Them is the culminating in-person event in a series of conversations examining how contemporary documentary forms participate in both the making and unmaking of carceral power. This symposium brings together organizers, filmmakers, scholars and artists—both with and without experiences of mass incarceration—for a daylong conversation on disrupting the carceral state and its media ecologies across multiple scales of intervention: from feminist organizing and prisoner-initiated programs to incarcerated media production, participatory defense, counterforensic art, and legal advocacy.
Image: Gilda Louise Sheppard, Director, Cahn Nguyen, Director of Photography. Since I Been Down, 2020
Symposium Program
9:30 am onward – Coffee + Pastries
10:00–10:15 – Welcome (Rachel Nelson + Pooja Rangan)
10:15–11:15 – Conversation: Adamu Chan + Gilda Sheppard, moderated by Gina Dent
A conversation on the challenges of pursuing anti-carceral aesthetics and the political stakes of speaking outside the carceral frame.
11:15–11:30 – Break
11:30–1:00 – Panel: Counterforensic Advocacy (Raj Jayadev, Sharon Daniel), moderated by Pooja Rangan
A panel on decarceral legal and policy interventions, including participatory defense, advocacy media, and counterforensic art
1:00–2:00 – Lunch
2:00–3:30 – Panel: Fugitive Media (Keisha Knight, Thanh Tran), moderated by Rachel Nelson
A panel on media produced behind bars and the activism involved in building oppositional circuits of visibility and solidarity
3:45–4:00 – Break
4:00–4:30 – Concluding Reflections – Gina Dent
4:30–5:30 – Reception
Speakers
Adamu Chan is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and community organizer from the Bay Area whose artistry is rooted in relationships and lived experience. His film What These Walls Won’t Hold, filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic in San Quentin State Prison, chronicles the organizing and connections that emerged despite incarceration. His work invites viewers into conversations about social justice, resilience, and community.
Sharon Daniel is a media artist and innovator in interactive documentary whose online artworks and multimedia installations examine social, racial, and environmental injustice. For over two decades, her creative research has focused on the criminal legal system, often in collaboration with incarcerated people and other impacted communities. Her work has been exhibited internationally and supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Program, and Rockefeller Foundation.
Gina Dent (Ph.D., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is Professor
of Humanities and Faculty Director of the Institute of the Arts & Sciences at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has won awards for her teaching (Dizikes
Faculty Teaching Award), advocacy (Chancellor’s Award for Diversity), and research
(Innovator of the Year). Currently, she serves as Principal Investigator and Co-Director
for Visualizing Abolition, a multidisciplinary project—involving exhibitions, events,
fellowships, and academic programs—addressing the global crisis of incarceration
through art and visual culture. Her recent collaborative projects grow out of her decades-
long work as a social justice advocate—Abolition. Feminism. Now. (co-authored with
Angela Davis, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, Haymarket 2022), and Seeing through
Stone (exhibition catalog, Marquand 2024).
Raj Jayadev is co-founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a San José-based organization focused on community organizing, advocacy, and multimedia storytelling. Through De-Bug’s Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project, he helped develop participatory defense, a community-driven model that supports families with loved ones facing the criminal legal system and works to shift power and influence case outcomes in the courts. Jayadev received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018 for his community-based justice work.
Keisha Nicole Knight is a researcher and cultural organizer based in Los Angeles. She previously served as Director of Funds and Advocacy at the International Documentary Association and was a Warhol Curatorial Fellow. Knight founded Sentient.Art.Film, a creative distribution initiative, and Solidarity Media Network, a hub for anti-carceral, anti-racist media production and organizing. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
Rachel Nelson is Director and Chief Curator of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and co-director with Gina Dent of Visualizing Abolition, an initiative that uses art and education to shift social attachments to prisons. She has curated numerous group and solo exhibitions and writes widely on contemporary art and geopolitics for publications such as Journal of Curatorial Studies, Brooklyn Rail, and Third Text. Nelson also teaches in the Visualizing Abolition Studies program at UC Santa Cruz.
Pooja Rangan is an award-winning documentary scholar and Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability, Thinking with an Accent (coedited), and Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. She is currently co-authoring a book on documentary and carceral world-building with filmmaker Brett Story, titled Why Look at Prisons.
Gilda Sheppard is faculty emerita in sociology, cultural and media studies at Evergreen State College in Tacoma, WA. Sheppard taught at Washington prisons for over a decade. She is an international award-winning filmmaker, most recently for her documentary, Since I Been Down, featuring the Black Prisoner Caucus and their prison initiated liberation education program.
Thanh Tran is an Amerasian Vietnamese and Black filmmaker, music artist, and community organizer from Sacramento, California. While incarcerated at San Quentin, he co-founded Uncuffed, an award-winning podcast, and ForwardThis Productions, one of the first film collectives led entirely by incarcerated people. He is now co-founder of New Krma Media and director of Finding Má, a feature documentary about his family’s search for their unhoused mother.
Free
