Forging Selfhood: Masculinity, Identity and Work in Arizona's Inmate Wildfire Program

The United States prison system is a true ‘black box’ of modern society; most penal philosophies, policies, and daily realities are obscured from the outside world. Because of this obscurity, the prison system is often presented as a reified institution that unilaterally enacts punitive and neoliberal mechanisms of control. My dissertation utilizes tools of in-depth ethnography to provide nuance to this potentially monolithic view. Lynch (2010) and Rubin (2015) argue that any state’s prison system, and indeed any one complex or yard, must be put in its social and ideological context. I draw on these premises to argue that prisons should be considered living, breathing spaces where individuals are capable of manifesting their own notions of selfhood each day. I explain how incarcerated people in a particular prison program find cracks in the seemingly solid, dehumanizing foundation of modern imprisonment, taking hold of spaces where access to dignity and hope remain. I offer a case study of Arizona’s Inmate Wildfire Program (IWP), in which incarcerated people are contracted by the state to fight wildfires. I became a certified wildland firefighter and spent 15 months fighting over 30 fires alongside three prison fire crews. This labor program presents an experiential paradox for its participants. It is at once exploitative—with little pay for risky work, and little material support upon release from prison—while simultaneously transformative for those who fight fires. By ‘transformative,’ I mean that certain aspects of the job of wildfire fighting provide individuals with more complex and powerful notions of selfhood than would otherwise be obtainable on the prison yard. There are three major aspects of incarcerated peoples’ identities that are positively impacted by the IWP. They are: 1) a physical and symbolic movement away from the social categorization that occurs in the carceral system; 2) a construction of alternative masculine identities based on tenets of vulnerability, intimacy, and racial inclusion; and 3) an expression of complex working identities that offers a sense of self that is antithetical to the obedient and routinized modes of being on the yard. Even as this labor program operates within the strictures of an inherently punitive regime, it provides space for participants to reject certain aspects of modern incarceration’s deleterious effects. Understanding the processes by which this program persists, and is experienced at a daily level for its participants, offers a more thorough view of the social complexities of modern incarceration. As such, this dissertation offers a dynamic case study that furthers debates in a broad array of literatures, including the anthropology of masculinity, the anthropology of work, and the anthropology of the prison

Anti-heroes, wildfire, and the complex visibility of prison labor

The vast majority of prison labor goes unnoticed by the public, serving as a microcosm of the invisibility of prisoners as a whole. This perpetuates stereotypical media representations and public perceptions of prison laborers as nothing more than their indentured subjugation. This photo essay presents a more nuanced view of the experience of prison labor. I present images of an exceptional labor program, Arizona’s Inmate Wildfire Program, in order to question what happens when prison labor becomes visible, and when the symbolic markers of incarceration disappear. The program, in which 11 prison crews fight wildfires across the state, is an experiential paradox for its participants. It is at once exploitative, with its low pay for risky work, as well as transformative, with its potential for a re-emergence of complex identities and reclamation of dignity for those involved. Through these images, I argue that the transformative potential of the program is due in part to the program’s visibility, as incarcerated firefighters interact with the public—and their own self-representations—in emergent, meaningful ways. I call to examine the complexities of programs that challenge certain dehumanizing experiences of incarceration while being securely entrenched within the carceral regime

Forging selfhood: Social categorisation and identity in arizona’s prison wildfire programme

This article examines the expressions of identity for participants in the Inmate Wildfire Program (IWP), a skilled prison labour programme in the US state of Arizona. The identity of imprisoned individuals is deleteriously shaped by the penal regime’s construction of the social category ‘criminal’. Yet this process in not totalising. Using evidence drawn from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with prison wildfire fighters, I argue that participation in the IWP encourages critical thinking, access to open space, and interactions with the public, which destabilises the label of criminality and allows prisoners to engage in positive forms of identity construction. Prison officials can incorporate aspects of the IWP into other prison programmes in order to promote the construction of non-carceral identities

Profiting from Punishment Drift: The Case for Abolishing For-Profit Prison Communication

Dr. Lindsey Raisa Feldman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis, in the paper titled “Profiting from Punishment Drift: The Case for Abolishing For-Profit Prison Communication,” describes the experience of social isolation for families of incarcerated loved ones. Drawing on ethnographic research with women in Memphis, TN, she argues that charging fees for communication between prison and the outside world causes undue harm, and calls to undo the for-profit communication regime currently at work in U.S. prisons. Although there are many features of the U.S. prison system that must be addressed, Dr. Feldman underscores that communication is fundamental to humanity, which is stripped away in this current era of mass incarceration

Emotional overlap and the analytic potential of emotions in anthropology

Emotions have historically played a marginal role in many arenas of anthropological analysis, often limited to describing certain aspects of research informants\u27 lives, or explaining the ethnographer\u27s own fieldwork experience. This paper proposes a more nuanced approach, pointing to the analytic potential of what we call emotional overlap. Emotional overlap occurs in ethnographic moments when the emotions of both the informant and the ethnographer are uncovered and acknowledged. Using evidence from a cumulated 28 months of fieldwork in an American prison and a poor Brazilian neighborhood, we describe the analytic potential for emotional overlap in qualitative research. We argue for the importance and necessity of privileging emotions as sites of epistemological reflection, in order to reaffirm what is most compelling about the discipline of anthropology and to maintain its relevance in the 21st century

Living at the LUX:Homelessness and Improvisational Waiting under COVID-19

This photo-essay engages with the central theme of waiting under COVID-19 among a group of homeless women at the LUX hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. The images and text capture the structural shelter-in-place conditions and how the women worked within those regulations to construct a new relationship to time and the self. The images in this essay reflect what we call improvisational waiting, a concept that emphasizes the creative ways women at the LUX turned experiences of waiting into novel rhythms of life that held the promise of a better future

Grit, Grind, and Praxis: The Memphis Model of Applying Anthropology

In this paper we define “The Memphis Model,” or the type of praxis-oriented, critically engaged anthropology developed and used by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Memphis. This model draws inspiration from the Grit and Grind ethos of the city of Memphis, along with its deep cultural and political traditions of grassroots activism for social justice. Here, we define how this is done in practice. The Department of Anthropology continually brings together current students, faculty, alumni, and community partners in coalition to develop approaches to address emerging social justice issues throughout the city, country, and world. This paper draws on one specific example, the Welcome Home Memphis Initiative, a long-term partnership with community housing agencies, alumni, faculty, and students to counter exploitative housing practices, to explain the process of the Memphis Model

It's Not Just Academic: The Importance of Program Development in Applied Anthropology Education

In this article we consider applied anthropology as it exists at the program level. While individual faculty can promote applied training, sustainability in applied education is only possible when entire faculties—and the college and university administrations that provide the necessary financial, structural, and social support—are committed to this approach. While many options for program development exist, we argue that being aware of what other programs are doing, and what is and is not working for them, is both time-saving and transformative. This article provides overviews of common applied anthropology training approaches, discusses the importance of support for applied programs, and introduces the rest of the articles in this series, which focus more specifically on particular approaches, programs, and training needs