About
ARCHIVING THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MASS INCARCERATION
The United States incarcerates the world’s largest prison population, caging, surveilling and supervising more people than any other nation. The Mass Incarceration Lab @CSREA seeks to curate a comprehensive archive of mass incarceration in the United States– centering and preserving the narratives and writings of those individuals (including family and community members) who have been impacted by the criminal justice system.
It is through their oral testimony and writings that we understand the “living history” of mass incarceration and its legacies. Ultimately, this humanities lab project is an important act of historical preservation, capturing first-person accounts of mass incarceration for generations to come and centering the voices of those who have been impacted.
The Mass Incarceration Lab is a Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity initiative generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
OUR TEAM
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Brown University and an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, IL. She is an affiliated fellow with Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA). She is the author of Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court (2016) and The Waiting Room (2018). She is the generator and faculty lead for the Mass Incarceration Lab @ CSREA, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Tarika Sankar, Ph.D, is the Digital Humanities Librarian at Brown University in the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS.) She is a critical scholar of Indo-Caribbean diaspora, race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, and digital humanities. She has been a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow, a research assistant on the What Every1 Says Project, and a Community Leader at the Digital Humanities Research Institute. She is also a collective member at Ro(u)ted By Our Stories, a digital oral history archive of marginalized voices within the Indo-Caribbean community. She has served as the CDS Project Manager for the Mass Incarceration Lab since summer 2023.
Ashley Champagne is the Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) and Cogut Institute Lecturer in Humanities at Brown University. She strategizes and coordinates the work within the CDS which includes over a dozen active digital scholarship projects including the Mass Incarceration Archive. She is the Principal Investigator of “New Frameworks to Preserve and Publish Born-Digital Art,” a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Katie Jain is a senior at Brown University concentrating in History and International and Public Affairs. Her research focuses on the legal right to health care and medical neglect in prisons. Katie joined the Mass Incarceration Lab in spring 2023 as a student contributor and now works with the CDS team to curate and organize letters and oral histories for the archive.
Kalie Minor is a sophomore concentrating in computer science and literary arts. She has worked with Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve to conduct oral histories and other external projects for the Mass Incarceration Lab. She now modifies and updates the MIL website.