Two events featuring activists Joy James and Susan Rosenberg will be held in the Kirkland Project at Hamilton College series "Technology, Science, and Democracy: What's at Stake?," on Thursday, Feb. 19. Through the Wire (1990), a documentary on the United States penal system's alleged mistreatment of prisoners will be screened at 4:15 p.m. in the Kirner-Johnson auditorium (room 144). James and Rosenberg will lead a panel discussion titled "Democracy and Captivity: Human Rights, Technology and the 'Science of Incarceration,'" at 7:30 p.m. in the Fillius Events Barn, Beinecke Student Activities Village.
Joy James, professor of Africana studies at Brown University, teaches political and feminist theory. She is the author of Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in US Culture (1996); Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (1997); and, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (2000).
James is also editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998); and co-editor with T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting of The Black Feminist Reader (2000); and, co-editor with Ruth Farmer of Spirit, Space, and Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe (Routledge, 1993), which received the 1994 outstanding book award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
James's current publications on incarceration and human rights include Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation and Rebellion (2003); and The New Abolitionists: Prison Writing on Incarceration, Enslavement and Emancipation (2004). She was a 2002 recipient of the Bellagio (Rockefeller Foundation) Fellowship, based on her research proposal "Cyberspace in Prison."
While a high school and college student in the 1970s, Susan Rosenberg organized for the Black Liberation and Puerto Rican independence movements and the student, anti-war and women's movements. Rosenberg was arrested in 1984 on charges of possessing weapons and false identification papers. She was convicted and sentenced to 58 years in prison. In 1988, she was charged in the "Resistance Conspiracy" case, but these charges were eventually dropped. For a number of years, she was held in the Lexington Control Unit, a "high-tech" prison within a prison eventually closed due to its use of sensory deprivation through technology and other human rights violations.
While incarcerated, Rosenberg continued to organize, teach and write; she also served as an HIV/AIDS peer educator. Her writings have appeared in the anthologies: Imprisoned Intellectuals; Criminal Injustice; and Doing Time.
Rosenberg obtained her masters degree in writing in 2000. She was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton in 2001. Currently she works as a human rights and prisoner rights activist in New York City, where she is completing a memoir, and teaching literature at CUNY's John Jay School of Criminal Justice.
Co-sponsors are the Program in Africana Studies and the Faculty for Women's Concerns. Both events are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Kirkland Project at 315-859-4288.
