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- Genre: Academic theses
Description
Women who are incarcerated are viewed as having departed from the hegemonic standard of motherhood, and become questionable in their roles as mothers, and are often perceived as "bad" mothers. While the challenges of parenting behind bars has been widely researched, there is a paucity of research that centers the experiences and challenges of mothers post-incarceration or probation and a void in the literature that attempts to view this population outside of the confines of the good/bad mother dichotomy. This dissertation explores how mothers who are formerly incarcerated or convicted describe their experiences navigating and negotiating their roles not as good or bad mothers but as fierce mothers. The concept of fierce mother exists outside of the good/bad mother binary; it is based on themes that emerged from the stories women told during our conversations about the practice of mothering. The energy of hard-won survival is what they bring to their mother roles and for many it drives their activism around prison abolition issues. Their stories challenge the normative discourse on good/bad mothers, justice, rights, freedom and dignity.
ContributorsGámez, Grace (Author) / Swadener, Beth B (Thesis advisor) / Gomez, Alan E (Thesis advisor) / Gonzales, Patrisia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation coheres together over a hundred insurgent testimonies published from within Arizona State Prison Complex – Perryville, the state’s only prison for women. These testimonies tell a people’s history of Arizona’s largest and most public legal intervention for prisoners’ rights: Parsons v. Ryan. In 2009, after Perryville correctional officers left Marcia Powell to bake to death in the Arizona summer sun, prisoners lit their mattresses on fire to proclaim that their lives were in danger, sparking a wave of resistance, including outside from family members and advocates, which prompted a class action lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Re-Entry (ADCRR). After years of prisoners’ calls for a systemic reckoning of the death-producing state punishment system, legal intervention distilled their suffering and demands into a set of discrete allegations. Meanwhile, settlement stipulations continue to implore ADCRR to meet minimum constitutional standards. While the accountability Parsons v. Ryan seeks is limited to the administration of medical care and extreme isolation, testimonies in this people’s history reveal a breadth of systemic violences that encompass and surpass the legal claims. These testimonies, which evidence strategies of care work, protest, and covert documentation, delineate the prison’s function to degrade human dignity and inflict physical and psychological harm in virtually every area of basic survival, including access to food, shelter, hygiene, and personal safety. Through use of the “rebel archive,” the resulting narrative, made possible by virtue of prisoners’ organizing for dignity, invokes a critical analysis of the sublimation of their resistance and demands for a project of liberal carceral care as prison reform.
ContributorsCooper, Ashley Ann (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Swadener, Elizabeth B (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This project aims to situate ending policing on campuses in K-12 education alongside broader social movements. How does the school reform movement connect to broader policing reform efforts in the US? Specifically, who are the key organizations or voices leading the movement in schools, what opportunities or barriers have shaped their efforts over time, and how does this connect to the work of other social movements in the US? Through interviews with frontline activists and school officials this thesis builds an analysis from critical race theory and the intellectual tradition of police abolition to examine the movement to end police presence at schools. The very presence of police on campuses impacts how and for whom schools are situated as a space for building communities of trust.
ContributorsHornback, Carlie Danielle (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / GrillerClark, Heather (Committee member) / Walker, Shawn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Deeply entrenched eugenic values overdetermine who is treated with care and dignity and who is treated with violence. These eugenic values inform and are informed by settler colonialism, patriarchy, and ableism. Carceral locales such as nursing homes, hospitals, and jails enact specific kinds of harm onto disabled people and rely on their convoluted and self-serving bureaucratic processes to evade responsibility. Given my interest in the indivisibility of carceral logics, spaces of capture, and ableism, my focus in this dissertation is both the real-life contexts of the individual incidents and the systemic, cross-institutional patterns evident in each of the three incidents analyzed.I take a modified case study approach to three incidents in which disabled people in carceral locales experience tremendous harm. The first incident is about the gross medical neglect and rape of a San Carlos Apache disabled woman at a skilled nursing care facility in Phoenix, Arizona. The second incident occurred at a hospital in Austin, Texas where doctors worked hastily to killing a Black disabled man within only days of his arrival and change his code status to Do Not Resuscitate against his family’s will. The third incident focuses on duty of care violations and disability-based discrimination against a white disabled man at a Chicago jail. These situations, when analyzed individually and with/against one another, identify important connections relating to institutional power and cross-institution patterns of harm. I find that the paternal dynamics of medical[ized] facilities, the pervading anti-disability sentiments in US society, and bureaucratic violence make accountability and justice impossible.
ContributorsPeer, Victoria (Author) / Swadener, Beth B (Thesis advisor) / Vega, Sujey (Committee member) / Gomez, Alan E (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022