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 virtual conversations examining how media participates in the production, circulation, and legitimation of carceral power. Across these discussions, and in the symposium itself, system-impacted organizers, filmmakers, advocates, and scholars explore how contemporary media ecologies sustain the carceral state and what it might take to interrupt them.

Pre-Symposium Virtual Panels

Virtual panels will be released in the weeks leading up to May 13

Film Pedagogy as Abolitionist Practice, featuring Brett Story, Christopher Harris, and Thanh Tran.

…But what about the Rapists and Murderers?, with Rachel Nelson, Laliv Melamed, and Deepa Dhanraj, addressing rape as a way of seeing the prison, and vice versa.

The Carceral-Entertainment Complex, featuring Vidal Guzman, David Osit, and Michelle Brown, examining collaborations among law enforcement, prisons, and corporate media.

Symposium Program

The symposium will unfold across three conversations, culminating in an evening reception. Confirmed speakers include Adamu Chan, Gina Dent, Sharon Daniel, Keisha Knight, Pooja Rangan, Gilda Sheppard, Silicon Valley Debug, and Thanh Tran.

Refusal and Representation
A conversation centered on independence from institutional control and the political stakes of speaking outside the carceral frame.

Production and Circulation
A panel confronting the infrastructures that shape incarcerated media (censorship, production conditions, funding, and distribution) and the possibilities for building alternative circuits of visibility and solidarity.

Policy and Forensic Intervention
A discussion of media as legal and political intervention, including sentencing mitigation and forensic media practices, considering both the strategies and the limits of working within legal systems from an abolitionist horizon.

Image: Gilda Louise Sheppard, Director, and Cahn Nguyen, Director of Photography. Since I Been Down, 2020.