Freedom and Imprisonment in American Literature

Jeff Hood’s story is particularly interesting for me. Hood got started working in activism in capital punishment cases when he was in grad school and shares the story of a heart breaking case where he stood outside with many prisoners when a stay was offered, and then the prisoner was executed a few hours later. […]Read Post ›

This class has been such an interesting adventure for me. As a Feminist Studies and Religion double major, I have a lot of opportunities to soak up a small piece of knowledge and send out some work about my connections or opinions on it. Everything is open to critique. In fact, in some classes there […]Read Post ›

Stories are told in so many different ways. Poetry, oral narratives, scholarly articles, and even documentaries are all some ways we’ve explored the prison narratives in our course this semester. Even though most of these different stories can be looked at as distinct and not similar in any way Southwestern has prepared us to find […]Read Post ›

My favorite text has definitely been Fourth City. The essays gave a strong voice to the incarcerated white the editor’s sections provided much needed context. It’s easy to get lost in these chapters, and this is definitely a book I will enjoy owning after this class is over. My favorite “digital technology” was the class […]Read Post ›

The poetry I transcribed from TAVP by Jorge Renaud was phenomenal and very related to discussions we’ve been having in class. **Underlined words are ones I’m unsure on and am waiting to hear back from Jorge on some of them (he proofread the first and has access to the google doc). “Lamentation for Literature” discusses […]Read Post ›

My task was to transcribe and sync about 55 minutes of Lori Bible sharing about her life growing up in southern Louisiana. At first, just listening to her story and not doing any work, I was immensely interested in her story and life—these scenic, slife-of-life type stories have always been comforting to me—but this interest […]Read Post ›

Early on in my young life—I say early, but really I mean high school—the concept of the digital humanities offended me. Partially motivated by pretension and partially by a (still sustained) interest in print theory, I objected to what I saw as a homogenization and intrusion upon the internal, personal, tactile merits of the humanities. […]Read Post ›

The texts that we have encountered throughout the course have ranged from from novels to poetry. All described this notation of imprisonment to some degree. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison as well as the Angela Davis readings looked at important racial aspects of the law and imprisonment. The prison system is diverse, but commonly associated […]Read Post ›

It’s hard to believe that this semester is almost at an end! During my long history as a student, I can easily say I have never had a classroom experience quite like this. As a psychology major, I have been taught over and over again that writing by hand helps with the encoding process therefore […]Read Post ›

Of all of the projects done within this course, I found work with the Texas After Violence Project to be the most useful, hands-on and engaging-so much so that I framed my final project for the Freedom and Imprisonment course around the organization. Working to merely get the stories out from moms, dads, siblings, teachers, coaches […]Read Post ›