David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow
About
"Making the High-Tech Prison: Media, Infrastructure, and Counter-Narratives of the Digital"
My dissertation explores the knowledge production, analysis, and media practices of imprisoned radicals and abolitionists, and their relationships to digital technology. Analyzing the archives of abolitionist intellectual and political work from the 1970s to the 2010s—in print and digital forms such as zines, essays, personal correspondence, podcasts, TikToks, and other social media ephemera—I show how surveillance, security, and digital communications technologies have structured political organizing and repression inside US prisons. Drawing on archival research on the US anti-prison movement as well as qualitative research methods in digital media studies, infrastructure studies, and comparative ethnic studies, “Making the High-Tech Prison” proposes an alternate theory of the digital that centers the insights and analysis of imprisoned radicals, allowing us to understand how emerging digital technologies have shaped longer arcs of political repression against movements for liberation.
Jasmine Ehrhardt is a PhD candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies.
