bfunk's bookmarks tagged carceral urbanism

The readings for one of my seminars have recently focused on urban issues surrounding racism and law enforcement. I was happy to find a long list of supplemental material under bfunk’s carceral urbanism tag.

The best two sentences I’ve read for class today highlight the difficulty of finding employment if you’re an ex-offender in the United States:

In another striking example of the creative remaking of worker identities within this racially structured contingent economy, it was reported that some Latino ex-offenders would on occasion pass themselves off as undocumented workers, in order to gain access to the word-of-mouth recruitment channels and labor corners that have been organized around the undocumented population. The kind of work that can be accessed through these means tends to be extremely exploitative and often dangerous, but by the standards of the ex-offender labor market it is comparatively plentiful.

From Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2008). Carceral Chicago: Making the Ex-offender Employability Crisis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2), 251-281. [available here behind a paywall]

Jody Williams, on collaboration via fax

Chief spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jody Williams used the fax machine to help build organizational capacity:

Imagine trying to get hundreds of organizations – each one independent and working on many, many issues – to feel that each is a critical element of the development of a new movement. I wanted each to feel that what they had to say about campaign planning, thinking, programs, actions was important. So, instead of sending letters, I’d send everyone faxes. People got in the habit of faxing back. This served two purposes – people would really have to think about what they were committing to doing before writing it down, and we have a permanent, written record of almost everything in the development of the campaign from day one.

The quotation comes from the FAQ section of the ICBL website.

English things

A set of brand-name English food product illustrations.

See also the set of two Scottish things.