'Philosophy in Prison: Critical Pedagogy and Marginal Standpoints'

My proposed project intends to investigate the relationship between the experience of taking Social Theory & Philosophy classes in an English prison and student-participants' self-conception. I will be conducting a mixed methods study, evaluating students' personal narratives and identities using interviews, focus groups, and survey. This project will be interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of critical pedagogies, criminological and philosophical theories of punishment, and recent developments in phenomenological qualitative research methodologies.

My project comes in the wake of record rates of violence, overcrowding, and recidivism in English and Welsh prisons. This crisis raises serious political and sociological questions particularly when recognised that groups marginalised by race, religion, and class are disproportionately represented in our prisons. Prison therefore represents an exacerbating process of both geographical and socio-political marginalisation for a large portion of its population. As poor resettlement and high reoffending rates suggest, prison helps to re-cycle high levels of exclusion and stigmatisation. I will be looking at how these groups themselves engage with opportunities for transformation and resistance within the prison's walls.

I argue that these contemporary trends can be intervened in through a process of 'normalisation' - helping prisons resemble wider society. Specifically, the aspects of normalisation I intend to look at are themes of identity, responsibility, and social change - important loci of behaviour and discussion amongst the unincarcerated population. I hope to see whether facilitating discussions of these themes with incarcerated persons in an educational setting can contribute to reducing the chasm between life on the 'inside' and 'outside', by enabling participants to (re)situate themselves in society.
A central theme of this project will be the interaction between identities and concepts, and the potential this holds for engendering resistance. This interaction centres on three theses, building on recent empirical work: identities are deeply connected to the conceptual frameworks people hold; and group identity is central in fostering the possibility of resistance; the possibility of resistance already exists in the minds of many prisoners.
A study of marginal spaces in which conceptual frameworks and identities are investigated is therefore apposite for questions of subaltern resistance. I intend to utilise the hermeneutic methods of Heideggerian phenomenology to investigate how prisoner-students' sense of personal identity is ontologically constitutive of their sense of social being. This focus aims to build on phenomenological work in both education and prison studies which, in privileging of prisoners' lived experience, has helped uncover how structures of power, identity, and resistance are both implicit and explicitly manifested in people's self-understanding.
This project aims to build on preliminary empirical observations that prison philosophy classes offer an opportunity for prisoners to approach questions of behaviour and identity from a social and transformative perspective, in contrast to individualistic therapeutic and criminal justice contexts. Much of the contemporary debate on education and prisoner re-entry is dominated by a problematic conflation of therapeutic, punitive, and parliamentary-political goals, a retributive rhetoric which has only intensified with the previous six Secretaries of State for Justice. Despite recent commendable efforts to move beyond employability-centred policies (Coates 2016), these efforts are followed by an equal-and-opposite emphasis on individualistic models of responsibility and punishment. Against these disciplinary models, this research is situated in support of expanding models of re-entry and civic responsibility to highlight the need for engaged and critical educational practice.