Doran Larson, the Walcott-Bartlett Chair of Ethics and Christian Evidences and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, recently presented papers at two virtual conferences
He discussed “Prison Witness, Prison Resistance: Working with The American Prison Writing Archive” at the Carceral Studies Conference based at The University of California-Santa Barbara and Birzeit University in Palestine. The meeting focused on “Global Carceral States: Violence, Transgressions, and Technologies of Imprisonment” and was simultaneously translated into Arabic and Spanish.
At the Law and Society Association Conference in Chicago, Larson presented “Beyond Transition or Reform: The Prison Witness as Agent of Transformational Justice.” The theme of the conference was “Crisis, Healing, Re-Imagining.”
Larson is the creator of the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), a public collection of first-person essays by incarcerated individuals, as well as prison workers and volunteers. The APWA is part of the Digital Humanities Initiative.