Course Description:
Prison Aesthetics and Policy is a cross listed Art & Criminology, Law, and Justice course at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). This course, taught by Laurie Jo Reynolds, takes aesthetic and political approaches to study the Illinois carceral landscape. Through theoretical readings, engaged research, and participatory interviews, we consider the daily lives of people under the most extreme forms of carceral control. This expansive consideration includes sensory experiences, movements, schedules, sense of time passing. The course focuses on the structure of the prison administration: the paramilitary structure, the bureaucracy, and the prison labor dynamic. We also examine the social and political relations between the Department of Corrections, legislators, advocates, family members, and prisoners, and the systems of classification and identification used by each. Throughout the course, we also consider ways that art can contribute to the dialogue about incarceration, and ways that artists can not only represent social and political problems, but advocate for policies to address them.
This course concentrates on the Illinois prison and reentry system, a conventional, state-sanctioned space of confinement. Of equal importance and urgency—conceptually and ethically—are spaces of detention where refugees, non-citizens, asylum seekers, civilly-committed people, renditioned people, people with disabilities, people with mental illness, and elderly are held, as well as the experiences of people on mandatory supervised release, electronic monitoring, public registries and other forms of carceral control.
Fall 2021 Cohort:
Amirah Nasir, MA student in Museum & Exhibition Studies
Andrew Chenohara, PhD student, Department of Educational Policy Studies – Social Foundations
Benjamin McManamon, MA student in Museum & Exhibition Studies
Celia Magnone, PhD student, Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice
Daisy Castillo, BA Student, Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice
Derek Holland, MFA, Department of Fine Arts
Hattie Braaten, MA student in Museum & Exhibition Studies
John Ramaker, MA student in Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice
Mariah Nelesen, MDes student, Masters of Design in Graphic Design
Samantha Kay, PhD student, Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice
Torey Cohen-Boseman, PhD student, Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice
