My current research examines the impacts of mass incarceration and prison privatization on livelihood strategies and life chances in communities in the U.S. South, over time. Popular narratives often frame mass incarceration in the United States as historically unique and carceral privatization as relatively “new.” I demonstrate the logics of racial capitalism and structures of the carceral state today, both in the sheer materiality of apprehended bodies and in its financing are contiguous with earlier iterations of labor and resource extraction, what I call carceral extractivism, spanning chattel slavery, convict leasing, farm tenancy, and the more recent reinvigoration of privatized prison building in the 1990’s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with multi-generational participants in Tallulah, a small predominately African American town in northeast Louisiana, I examine the ways in which people make lives worth living alongside extractive carceral institutions through various forms of work, including scrapping metal, cottage food industries, and involvements with local churches. Through these livelihood creating activities, centered around an ethic of “acting right,” non-carceral spaces of social reproduction are created, resisting, even as they are constrained by, carceral entrepreneurship in the community and broader region. 

Graduate

ANT 734: Seminar in Economic Anthropology

ANT 660: Ethnographic Research Methods

Undergraduate

ANT 352: Special Topics: Prisons and Policing Borders

ANT 352: Special Topics: Business Anthropology

ANT 311: Anthropology of Globalization (TA)

ANT 160: Cultural Diversity in the Modern World

WRD 110 and 111: Composition and Communication I & II