Secondary Collaborators
Maritza Lopez, Program Director, Bruin Underground Scholars Program
Nicholas Shapiro, DPhil, Assistant Professor, UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics
Sam Prater, Ed.D, Founder & Executive Director, LA Room & Board.
Encountering epistemological horizons: carceral intelligence and decarcerating the classroom
This project takes on a new approach to serving UCLA students who have been negatively impacted by the criminal-legal system, and/or who are formerly-incarcerated students. While UCLA has made significant strides to support these vulnerable populations through efforts with Bruin Underground Scholars, Advanced Academic Placement, and others, one of the biggest challenges this particular student population faces is that a unique mode of intelligence they possess as a result of their lived experience of incarceration has gone unacknowledged. Yet the personal experience of being subjected to and negatively impacted by the criminal-legal system has given them a unique mode of reasoning at several nodes of intersectionality. This epistemological lens concerns not only their ways of seeing but also with their ways of being that incorporate important modes of inquiry and reasoning. This carries import for their education, and holds out significant promise for what this mode of reasoning could do to enhance their learning and life beyond their studies at UCLA.
Encountering these new epistemological horizons means developing what I call, “carceral intelligence,” a mode of reasoning grounded in the unique experiences of some of UCLA’s most vulnerable, yet highly capable and most promising student population. The idea of this educational insight will be developed through the completion of a theoretical article for a peer review journal. After this, and building upon insights from this article, focus groups will be held with important UCLA units of interest that have made noteworthy investments in this student population, along with a nearby partner organization that employs system-impacted and formerly-incarcerated UCLA students, and which houses students negatively impacted by the criminal-legal system who are pursuing their education as part of their criminal-court sentence. These focus groups will develop the idea of “carceral intelligence” while developing a new approach to “decarcerating” the public university classroom.