Stepping Into Prison: Communication Activism and Pedagogy Beyond Classrooms

Autoethnographic methods are used to examine and reflect on my experiences over seven years as a volunteer participant and co-facilitator of communication-based workshops in prison settings. Framing practice-based discoveries as engaged scholarship, I consider the potential impact of immersive, embodied co-learning processes with inmates and the ways in which scholars, artists, and activists can help bridge divides between prisons, communities, and campuses. Situating this work within the U.S. history of mass incarceration, I argue that Alternatives to Violence Project workshops function as critical communication pedagogies that work to build community and the compassion needed to support activist movements for decarceration and social justice.

“People Like Us”

This chapter addresses the question of how to move beyond our national addiction to racism, arguing that public attitudes can be changed from punitive to compassionate through closer knowledge of prisoners and their experiences. As evidence of this claim, the chapter chronicles the experiences of a longtime New Jersey-based workshop leader for the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), a volunteer network that offers conflict-transformation workshops in prisons and communities. The chapter examines public discourse on prisons and detailing the intersections of crime, fear, and social inequality that reinforce the racism of the prison-industrial complex. It also sketches the parameters of an inclusive vision of community safety based not on punishment, but on ethics of nonviolence, care, and compassionate love.

Firearms and the Decline of Violence in Europe: 1200-2010

Personal violence, has declined substantially in Europe from 1200-2010. The conventional wisdom is that the state’s monopoly on violence is the cause of this happy result. I find some evidence that does not support this hypothesis. I suggest an alternative hypothesis that could explain at least some of the reduction in violence, namely that the invention and proliferation of compact, concealable, ready-to-use firearms caused potential assailants to recalculate the probability of a successful assault and seek alternatives to violence. I use structural change models to test this hypothesis and find breakpoints consistent with the invention of certain firearms.

Macedonia may run out of alternatives to violence

Headline MACEDONIA: Alternatives to violence may be running out