Carceral Archipelagos

The 2026–2027 Feminisms Unbound series opens with "Carceral Archipelagos," moderated by Andrés Henao Castro, Associate Professor of Political Science at UMass Boston. This conversation examines the prison industrial complex, the carceral logics of power that reach far beyond prison walls, and the feminist organizing that resists them while building more democratic and liberatory worlds.

Students, faculty, and community members are warmly invited to join the conversation

Meet our panelists:

Joy James

Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, Joy James is a political philosopher who works with organizers. Her recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her edited volumes with Pluto Press are: Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons; ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures; and Confronting Counterinsurgency: Cop Cities and Democracy's Terrors. Her forthcoming book is on the Captive Maternal and Anti-Fascism.

Lara Sheehi

Lara is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture. Her new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures was released by Pluto Press in May 2026.

Anna Terwiel

Anna Terwiel is Associate Professor of political theory at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Her research focuses on the politics of punishment and prison abolition, taking up issues such as the meaning of “carceral feminism,” incarcerated people’s “right to comfort,” and the environmental politics at play in struggles against “Alligator Alcatraz,” the now-closed immigrant detention facility in Florida. Terwiel is the author of Prison Abolition for Realists (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which was awarded an honorable mention for the 2026 Michael Harrington Book Award. The book counters common preconceptions of prison abolition as an idealistic, moral, or politically naive project, and argues that prison abolition fits in the realist political tradition. At Trinity College, Terwiel also co-directs Trinity’s Prison Education Project (TPEP), which offers credit-bearing classes to incarcerated people at the Hartford Jail and York Correctional Institution, the state’s jail and prison for people assigned female at birth.