Later this week I’ll be moderating a roundtable and presenting a paper at the annual meeting of the Law & Society Association. The theme of the roundtable is “The Reproduction of Legal Order” and includes a number of talented early-career political theorists. The panel is titled “Analyzing Change Across the Penal Field” and I’ll be presenting an article related to my current book project. June 6-7.
Next week I’ll be giving a talk at the Center for Humanities Research as a part of my fellowship. Details are available at this link.
In June I’ll be facilitating a roundtable at the Law and Society Association’s annual meeting on “the reproduction of legal order.” Participants include Ainsley LeSure (Brown), Yuna Blajer de la Garza (Loyola), Anna Daily (Sacramento), Kathryn Heard (Dickinson), and Marcus Board Jr. (Howard). June 6-9 in Denver, Colorado.
This term I’m a fellow at the Center for Humanities Research at GMU. I’ll be using my time at the Center to work on my new book project — the working title is At Risk: Poverty and Democratic Culture in a Community Boarding School.
In February, I’ll participate in an APSA-organized research group led by Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien and Christopher Towler. The purpose of this group is to assist researchers in preparing their material for publication in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (JREP) potentially as part of a special issue.
Last month the IRB at Mason approved my follow-up study. Over the month of November I’ll be in the field interviewing current staff and former students of a boarding school, collecting records at the institution, and photographing documents in nearby archives. I’m absolutely thrilled to be diving headfirst into this project!
I’m presenting the most recent draft of my paper on legal socialization and resistance next week at the WPSA Virtual Community Mini-Conference in Political Theory. Join if you can — Saturday, Sept. 9 at noon (ET).
I’m on leave this fall. Over the next few months I’ll be working on my next project on youth politics and legal socialization. (The current, sure-to-change working title is Governing Children.) I’m pairing ethnographic data I collected in 2013-14 at a boarding school with a ten year follow-up (2023-24). It will be a joy to immerse myself in a new book-length project and, in the spring, to start assembling a manuscript.
Earlier this month I received the first prints of Democracy in Captivity — it’s wonderful to finally hold a physical copy!
My article “The Submerged Prison State: Punishment, private interests, and the politics of public accountability” has been accepted for publication at Punishment and Society. [Online first copy available here.]
Here’s the abstract:
Much of the US penal state is ‘submerged,’ in the sense that Suzanne Mettler uses the term. There are networks of rules and regulations that link public funds, services, and institutions to various private interests with far reaching consequences. These networks are largely a stealth presence in the lives of citizens and their subterranean status, I argue, warps the wider politics of punishment. Resources are circulated along this network in such a way revenue is generated for some, costs cut for others, all in the shadow of public law. To the extent that this kind of redistribution lacks citizens’ consent and approval, it also represents a potentially undemocratic development. Here, I show how the obscured visibility of these public-private connections distorts public attitudes about, and public support for, the penal state. The final pages draw out the normative implications of that distortion.
Keywords:
access to justice, civil law, tax expenditures, carceral state, privatization, regulation, politics of punishment, democratic theory
Christopher D. Berk 