Doctoral Dissertation Research: Networks of Support and Solidarity in Carceral Contexts

监狱的经历不仅包括目前被关押在美国监狱中的200多万人，还包括那些与被监禁者联系在一起的更广泛的社会、情感和亲属网络中的人。这个博士论文项目旨在调查在监禁期间如何建立、改变或维持团结、亲属关系和亲和关系。在探索这样一个问题的过程中，本研究考察了被监禁的人和与他们有密切关系的人如何在监狱境内外建立情感网络、相互关系和互惠关系。除了资助人类学研究生在经验、科学数据收集和分析方法方面的培训外，该项目还努力通过面向公众的场所和有组织的传播分享其发现，丰富公众对科学和科学方法的理解。该项目还扩大了历史上代表性不足的群体对科学知识生产的参与。这项研究的一个核心假设是，监禁影响了被监禁者之间的社会联系强度及其社会网络，其方式与奴隶制的系统性相似。这位博士生通过对历史和当代时期的档案资料进行深入、严谨的分析来验证这一假设。研究人员将通过12个月的参与者观察和大约75个半结构化访谈来补充这些数据，这些访谈来自两个促进与被监禁者沟通的组织。因此，虽然许多衍生性研究暗示了美国奴隶制和监禁之间的联系，但本研究将是第一个用科学和民族志的眼光来检验这种联系的假设的研究之一。在此过程中，本博士论文项目推动了新兴的跨学科学术研究，旨在揭示可用的监狱历史，以便更好地理解当代监狱系统的范围和规模。该项目整合了对档案、社会法律和民族志数据的分析，以提高对人们如何驾驭机构官僚主义和空间挑战的科学理解，以建立和维持情感和基于亲属的关系。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The carceral experience encompasses not only the over two million people currently incarcerated in American prisons, but also those within the broader social, affective, and kin networks with which incarcerated individuals are connected. This doctoral dissertation project seeks to investigate how relationships of solidarity, kinship, and affinity are created, changed, or maintained during imprisonment. In exploring such a question, this research examines how imprisoned people and the people with whom they share close ties manage to build affective networks, bonds of mutuality, and reciprocity within and across prison borders. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project strives to enrich the public's understanding of science and the scientific method by sharing its findings through public-facing venues and organizational dissemination. The project also broadens the participation of historically underrepresented groups in the production of scientific knowledge. A core hypothesis of this research is that incarceration impacts the strength of social bonds among imprisoned people and their social networks in ways that parallel the systematicity of chattel slavery. The doctoral student tests this hypothesis through an in-depth, rigorous analysis of archival sources from historical and contemporary epochs. The researcher will complement these data with twelve months of participant observation and approximately seventy-five semi-structured interviews with interlocutors in two organizations that facilitate communications with incarcerated individuals. Thus, while many generative studies insinuate a link between enslavement and imprisonment in the United States, the present study will be one of the first to test a hypothesis about the link with a scientific and ethnographic eye. In so doing, this doctoral dissertation project advances the ascendant, interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to uncover a usable carceral past in order to better comprehend the scope and scale of the contemporary prison system. The project integrates analysis of archival, sociolegal, and ethnographic data to improve scientific understanding of how people navigate institutional bureaucracies and spatial challenges to forge and maintain affective and kin-based relationships.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.