Workshop on Punishment and Social Control: Guest Lecture by Jessica Simes, Boston University

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The Workshop on Punishment and Social Control is a new interdisciplinary research community at UMass Amherst that is open to scholars across the Five Colleges. The workshop brings together faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and other researchers studying policing, courts, jails, prisons, and related systems of punishment and social control. We meet monthly during the academic year to workshop in-progress research — working papers, book proposals, book or dissertation chapters, and funding applications — and to host invited speakers. 

The first guest speaker in the series will be Jessica T. Simes, Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her work contributes to sociological research on racial inequality, mass incarceration, the conditions of prison confinement, and the social structure of cities. Simes’s book, Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment in America (October 2021, University of California Press), describes in unprecedented detail the consequences of mass incarceration for neighborhoods and communities in the United States. Current projects include a field study of solitary confinement and studies of racial and mental health disparities in solitary confinement.

The workshop's format is deliberately non-hierarchical: everyone gives and receives feedback as peers.offers a supportive space to share in-progress research—working papers, book proposals, grant applications, and early-stage ideas. Whether punishment and social control are at the center of your research or your work approaches these questions from another angle, you are welcome to RSVP for this series.

All workshops are 10-11:30 AM and generally scheduled on the second Friday of the month. Free parking passes are available to non-UMass attendees. Please umass [dot] punishmentworkshop [at] gmail [dot] com (email) 48 hours in advance to request a pass.