University of Washington
Prisons, State Violence, and
the Organizing Tradition
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.
This lecture explores the central role that people in prison played during the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that today’s mass incarceration began as a response to the mass mobilization of prisoners and neighborhoods.
A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.
This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Popel Shaw Center for Race and Ethnicity.
Biography (provided by the speaker)
Dan Berger is an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and an adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Washington Seattle. He studies race, prisons, and social movements in U.S. history. A widely published author, Berger’s most recent book is Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida in 2003 and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. He was the George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication from 2010-2012 and an associate postdoctoral fellow in the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis in 2011-2012. Berger is a co-founder of Decarcerate PA, a campaign working to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania, and an active member of the Critical Prison Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association.
Lecture Video