Eastern State Penitentiary

(photo by author)

Welcome

My scholarship explores how punishment and law are culturally experienced at the most punitive of historical moments when communities and societies collectively decide to sever social relationships and exclude, segregate, or inflict pain upon groups and categories of people.  In such settings, contests and processes in the production of meaning are most stark, precisely because they are occurring where social institutions and relationships are disrupted, where the social bond most often fails.  My cases, ranging from prison work to the prison film, from the execution of Timothy McVeigh to the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib, are strategical research sites from which to explore how cultural meanings are produced and social practice is decided.  In these settings, social reaction is sorely tested in its capacity to respond and govern effectively, purposefully, and meaningfully.  My research takes on the specific problems that emerge when we engage in such contexts with special attention to the social and ethical commitments that develop and are subsumed at these intersections.  What ultimately unites my work, now and in the future, is a commitment to uncovering the darker and more exclusionary side of social life in order to point toward a social order that is directed instead at socializing and integrating people.

Michelle Brown

Assistant Professor

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Bentley Annex 162

Ohio University

Athens, OH 45701

Contact Information:

Phone: 740 593 1372

Fax: 740 593 1365

E-mail: Michelle.Brown.1@ohio.edu