For this video interview, I spoke with Rallie Murray, PhD, managing editor for the Journal of World-Systems Research, and editor as well as contributing author of Piercing the Shroud: Destabilizations of ‘Evil’, published in 2019.
Rallie recently earned a doctorate in anthropology and social change from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Rallie’s dissertation engages with the transformative potential of education inside prisons in the US and in apartheid South Africa.
We discussed the dissertation work and spoke about the following on October 28:
Rallie’s ethnographic research into prisons and prisoner resistance
Different approaches to world-systems analyses and to understanding the existing world-system and capitalist world-economy
The concept and formation of “exilic spaces”
The tension-filled creation of those spaces inside carceral facilities and their enduring import
The concept of hegemony in the Gramscian tradition and in world-systems theory
Carceral hegemony
The work of world-systems scholar and organizer Andrej Grubačić
The late anthropologist David Graeber, his scholastic brilliance and academic struggles in the US
The late world-systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein
The late social critic and engaged scholar Mike Davis
Classism in academia, professional-managerial class values and related class reproduction in society, along with work Joy James has done in this area as it pertains to liberatory and prison-related struggles… I realized we should have but neglected to mention the anthologies of work by political prisoners — namely, “Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion,” and “The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings” — Dr. Joy James compiled…
Possibilities and pitfalls of education on the inside
The 1971 Attica prison uprising/massacre and what it inspired
The 2011 and 2013 hunger strikes at Pelican Bay State Prison
Rallie’s relationships with folks in San Quentin State Prison
The advent of the supermax prison at the United States Penitentiary Marion in Illinois
Solitary confinement as torture
The theory and practice of imprisoned artist and organizer Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson
The 2016 and 2018 prison strikes that swept across the country
Philosophies of prison abolition
Differing abolitionist emphases on processes versus outcomes
The lack of attention sometimes paid to prisons and to prisoner solidarity among those working toward abolition of the prison-industrial complex abolition (PIC)
Ongoing campaigns to end Brittney Griner’s imprisonment in Russia and to bring the WNBA All-Star home
Criticisms of punitive frameworks for justice
Transformative justice over penal approaches to repairing harm
Efforts to popularize and connect movements to transform justice and end incarceration
The accessibility and usefulness of Angela Davis’s work as an introductory primer to prison abolition and the concept of abolition-democracy
My frustration with affluent coastal disdain for the US Midwest and my Illinois roots.
We discussed that and more over the course of a conversational interview lasting just over two and a half hours. You can check out our entire dialogue in the embedded video.
