Dr. Lisa Guenther, Department of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University, is one of the nation’s leading researchers on solitary confinement, the carceral state, race and racism, and public philosophy.  She will keynote the Student Peace Alliance lecture series: Criminal Justice and the Struggle for Civil Rights.  She is the author of: The Gift of the Other: Levinas And the Politics of Reproduction (SUNY Press, 2006); Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its afterlives (Minnesota University Press, 2013); Co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (Fordham University Press, 2015).  She founded Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice; co-founded the REACH Coalition, a death row think tank directed toward education and community healing; and teaches a weekly philosophy course on Tennessee’s death row.

She describes her newest project as follows:

"I am currently working on a book that is tentatively entitled, Life Against Social Death: From Reproductive Injustice to Natal Resistance. The book explores the structural and historical connections between reproductive politics and the politics of mass incarceration and capital punishment in the United States. It begins with a biopolitical analysis of philosophical and political debates over abortion and the death penalty from the 1970s to the present. The main chapters of the book then situate these debates in relation to the politics of mass incarceration and prison abolition, elaborating a critical phenomenological method for naming, mapping, and dismantling the oppressive structures that (re)produce the carceral state. The book concludes with concrete case studies of prisoner resistance and other radical social movements for decarceration.”

 Her talk with us will be on the following:


 The Unmaking and Remaking of the World in Long-Term Solitary Confinement


Abstract: In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world in which the tools that ought to support a person’s embodied capacities are used as weapons to break them down.  I argue that the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison functions as a weaponized architecture of torture in precisely this sense.  But in recent years, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world through collective resistance.  This resistance took the form of a hunger strike in which prisoners exposed themselves to the possibility of biological death in order to contest the social and civil death of solitary confinement.  By collectively refusing food, and by articulating the meaning and motivation of this refusal in articles, interviews, artwork, and legal documents, prisoners reclaimed and expanded their perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities for world-making, even in a space of systematic torture.