Nicole R. Fleetwood (February 24, 1973) is an American academic, curator, police abolitionist, prison abolitionist, and author. She is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, Fleetwood was Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University.
Fleetwood grew up and attended public schools in Hamilton, Ohio before briefly moving to Texas, then returning to graduate from Hamilton High School in 1990. She grew up in a large extended family of gospel, funk, and rock musicians. Her maternal relatives, the Troutmans, created the pioneering funk band Zapp. Fleetwood has spoken and written about the impact of music, policing, and imprisonment on her family and community. [1]
In 1992, Fleetwood was chosen for the Erasmus International Exchange program to study human rights law and feminist studies at Utrecht University. In 1994, Fleetwood received a bachelor of philosophy degree (B.Phil.) from the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University of Ohio and her master's degree and doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1998 and 2001, respectively. [2]
Fleetwood's expertise is centered on contemporary black diasporic art and visual culture, gender and feminist studies, prison abolition, carceral studies and poverty studies. [3]
From 2001 to 2003, Fleetwood began as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Film and Drama at Vassar College. In 2003, she joined the faculty of the Department of American Studies at University of California, Davis. She moved to Rutgers University, New Brunswick in 2005. Serving from 2013 to 2016, Fleetwood became the first Black director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers.
In 2012, Fleetwood won the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association for her book, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness, published in 2011 with the University of Chicago Press. She published her second book, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination, in 2015 and a portion of it was translated into Italian for A fior di pelle: Bianchezza, nerezza, visualità, a collection of chapters and essays on race and visuality.
Fleetwood has organized several programs on visual culture, poverty studies, and carceral studies. In 2014, Fleetwood co-organized with her colleague Sarah Tobias Marking Time: Prison Art and Activism, a conference and six-site exhibition at Rutgers University based on research that she had begun in 2010 on the visual culture of mass incarceration. [4] In 2017, she co-curated the exhibition, State Goods: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration, with Walter E. Puryear at the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx. [5] In 2018, Fleetwood collaborated with Aperture Foundation on Prison Nation, an issue of Aperture magazine and a traveling exhibition of the same name, focusing on photography's role in documenting mass incarceration.
In 2020, Harvard University Press published Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Fleetwood's decade-long study of the visual art and culture of contemporary prisons in the United States. The book has been included in several 2020 "best books" and selected reading lists by major media and cultural outlets such as the New York Times, The National Book Foundation and the Smithsonian. It won the 2020 National Book Critics Award in Criticism and became the only publication to win both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism from the College Art Association. The exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (September 17, 2020 – April 5, 2021) was also curated by Fleetwood at MoMA PS1 based on the text. The exhibition was listed as "one of the most important art moments in 2020" by The New York Times, [6] and among the best shows of the year by The New Yorker [7] and Hyperallergic. [8] ' Following the presentation at MoMA PS1, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration was exhibited at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (September 17, 2021 – December 11, 2021). [9]
In 2021, Fleetwood joined New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development as the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor.
Fleetwood has written art catalogue essays and cultural criticism on Angela Y. Davis, [10] John Edmonds, [11] Gordon Parks, [12] Deana Lawson, [13] Rihanna, [14] Mickalene Thomas, [15] Fatimah Tuggar, [16] Diana Ross, Serena Williams, and LeBron James. [17] Fleetwood's work has been covered by major media outlets including CNN, the Atlantic, National Public Radio, the New York Times, and The New Yorker.
The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 publication, Surveiller et Punir, to describe the modern penal system of the 1970s, embodied by the well-known penal institution at Mettray in France. The phrase combines the adjective "carceral", which means that which is related to jail or prison, with archipelago—a group of islands. Foucault referred to the "island" units of the "archipelago" as a metaphor for the mechanisms, technologies, knowledge systems and networks related to a carceral continuum. The 1973 English publication of the book by Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago referred to the forced labor camps and prisons that composed the sprawling carceral network of the Soviet Gulag.
The feminist school of criminology is a school of criminology developed in the late 1960s and into the 1970s as a reaction to the general disregard and discrimination of women in the traditional study of crime. It is the view of the feminist school of criminology that a majority of criminological theories were developed through studies on male subjects and focused on male criminality, and that criminologists often would "add women and stir" rather than develop separate theories on female criminality.
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Jonathan Simon is an American academic, the Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, and the former Associate Dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His other interests include criminology; penology; sociology; insurance models of governing risk; governance; the origins and consequences of, and solutions to, the California prison "crisis"; parole; prisons; capital punishment; immigration detention; and the warehousing of incarcerated people.
Fatimah Tuggar is a interdisciplinary artist born in Nigeria and based in the United States. Tuggar uses collage and digital technology to create works that investigates dominant and linear narratives of gender, race, and technology. She is currently an associate professor of AI in the Arts: Art & Global Equity at the University of Florida in the United States.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a prison abolitionist and prison scholar. She is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has been credited with "more or less single-handedly" inventing carceral geography, the "study of the interrelationships across space, institutions and political economy that shape and define modern incarceration". She received the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Geographers.
Deana Lawson (1979) is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.
Heather Ann Thompson is an American historian, author, activist, professor, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. Thompson won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2016 Bancroft Prize, and other awards for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
Marie Gottschalk is an American political scientist and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, known for her work on mass incarceration in the United States. Gottschalk is the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (2006) and Caught: the Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (2016). Her research investigates the origins of the carceral state in the United States, the critiques of the scope and size of the carceral network, and the intersections of the carceral state with race and economic inequality.
Baz Dreisinger is an American academic, cultural critic and activist. She is a professor of English at City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the founder of the Prison-to-College Pipeline and the executive director of Incarceration Nations Network.
Carolyn Baxter is an African-American poet, playwright, and musician. Baxter is from Harlem, New York. She was a participant in the Black Panthers School Breakfast Program. Baxter was formerly incarcerated at the New York City Correctional Institute for Women at Rikers Island. Her writings are considered a part of the Prison Art's Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Zora J. Murff is an American photographer, curator, and educator. He is currently based in Fayetteville, Arkansas and teaches photography at the University of Arkansas. Murff's work focuses on social and cultural constructs including race and criminality, and grapples with how photography is used as a technology to perpetuate intentions and desires. His series, Corrections, is a visual exploration of kids in the juvenile criminal justice system in Eastern Iowa.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Jesse Krimes is an American artist and curator who focuses on criminal injustice and contemporary perceptions of criminality.
Ronnie Goodman was a homeless artist who lived on the streets of San Francisco, California. Goodman became a local celebrity after the quality of his artwork gained recognition. He was also known as a distance runner who competed in local marathons. Goodman's character, artwork and biography which appeared in newspapers, Runner's World magazine and documentaries, helped humanize the homeless crisis in San Francisco. Goodman died in his encampment in the Mission District of San Francisco on August 7, 2020, aged 60.
Zachary Fabri is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
Liat Ben-Moshe is a disability scholar and assistant professor of criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ben-Moshe holds a PhD in sociology from Syracuse University with concentrations in Women and Gender Studies and Disability Studies. Ben-Moshe's work “has brought an intersectional disability studies approach to the phenomenon of mass incarceration and decarceration in the US”. Ben-Moshe's major works include Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts: Incorporating Disability into the University Classroom and Curriculum (2005), Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014), and Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020). Ben-Moshe is best known for her theories of dis-epistemology, genealogy of deinstitutionalization, and race-ability.
Ashley Hunt is an American artist, activist, writer and educator, primarily known for his photographic and video works on the American prison system, mass incarceration and the prison abolition movement. He is currently a faculty member of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.
Jackie Wang is an American poet and scholar of the political economy of prisons and surveillance. In 2021 she was a National Book Award finalist in poetry for her book The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void.
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an American writer, sociologist, criminologist and social worker from Chicago, Illinois. He teaches at the University of Chicago in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation.
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