How is the prison a border? How do global forces shape the dynamics of incarceration and punishment in the United States? How can scholars ethically relate to prisons as sites that reproduce hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geography?

This discussion used Angela Davis’ & Gina Dent’s published conversation, “Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender, Globalization, and Punishment,” as the starting ground to address these questions.  Dent and Davis discussed the history of studying prisons as well as the productive tensions between feminist and abolitionist paradigms for thinking and researching. Using the transcript of this conversation, participants discussed the global politics of incarceration, the role and limitations of scholarship in carceral settings, and the gendered forms of domination that emerge in carceral settings.