Casa Hispánica
Justice-in-Education Initiative
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia School of Journalism
Department of English and Comparative Literature, Department of History, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Sing Sing Prison Museum, Tamer Center for Social Enterprise
REGISTER: Online via Zoom and in person.
The struggle of political prisoners for the right to education during their imprisonment and exile, the clandestine schools that they set up, the fight for access to books, all attest to the importance of education as part of a wider project of political and social emancipation. So does research that has shown that confined education rehabilitates the non-political prisoner, fosters a democratic and equitable environment in the prison, and helps to reduce recidivism. Why, then, is prison education considered a privilege and not a means, as Bentham said, “to prevent transgressing; to save punishing?” The strike of the guards in the New York State prisons put a stop to most programming and set prison education backwards. The assault on programming followed long-term and systematic strictures placed on prison education as prisons constrict class time, withhold clearance of books, discourage faculty by making entrance to facilities onerous, disallow even controlled access to electronic libraries and educational search engines, and force instruction to outdated pedagogical modalities. Additionally, prison education has to grapple with an inherent pedagogical challenge: the non-homogeneity of the prison population and the prison classroom present drastically different levels of preparation, aptitude, and motivation that upset the educational models deployed on the outside. At this time, when education is under attack by a government that has sworn to protect it, we rearticulate the position that education is a foundational and universal right.
About the Panelists
William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), has written extensively about social justice and democracy, education and the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His books include To Teach; On Becoming a Teacher; Fugitive Days; Public Enemy; and When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer.
Julie Stone Peters is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law in London. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her books include Law as Performance, Staging Witchcraft Before the Law, and Women’s Rights, Human Rights. She teaches regularly at MDC Brooklyn.
Neni Panourgiá (moderator) is an anthropologist, adjunct Associate Professor at the Psychology Department, Academic Adviser at the Justice-in-Education Initiative, and faculty at the Prison Education Program at Columbia University. In the New York prison system, she teaches classes on anthropology and ethnography, cultural political thought, and critical medical studies. She works at the nexus of history, politics, and the apparatus of discipline focusing on the multi-valence of confinement. Among her monographs are Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity. An Athenian Anthropography and Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State. She has edited East of Attica. Photographs 1930-1997, “COVID-19: Auto-ethnographies of Incarceration,” and co-edited, with George Marcus, Ethnographica Moralia. Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology” and a new edition of Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher. Her essays have appeared in Mousse, Documenta, American Ethnologist, angelaki, Public Culture, Anthropology and Humanism, among others. Her latest book Λέρος: Η γραμματική του εγκλεισμού, (in Greek) is in its second edition and forthcoming in English as Foucault’s Node: Leros and the Grammar of Confinement.
Noah Remnick is an organizer and lecturer at the Columbia University Center for Justice. He teaches college courses in history at a variety of correctional facilities across New York and leads a reading group at Sing Sing for men on life sentences. He received his DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, and he has been published in the Journal of Urban History on school policing and student resistance.
Sherika Stewart is Program Manager for Community Programs, at Petey Greene Program in New York. She is a carceral education strategist and policy professional whose work focuses on strengthening education and reentry ecosystems for system-impacted communities. At Petey Greene Program she helps manage, support, and grow the region’s programmatic footprint by deepening partnerships, refining program delivery, and aligning services with on-the-ground realities. Her expertise spans program creation and refinement, partnership strategy, and policy-informed implementation, with a strong emphasis on accountability, sustainability, and real-world functionality. Sherika is skilled at translating complex institutional constraints into education and reentry models that are humane, effective, and responsive to both learners and partners. In addition to her role at PGP, Sherika works as a consultant and thought partner to organizations seeking to strengthen education, reentry, and justice-adjacent initiatives.
Cheryl Wilkins is the Co-Founder and Co-Director at Columbia University’s Center for Justice (CFJ) where her work is committed to ending the nation’s reliance on incarceration, developing new approaches to safety and justice, and participating in the national and global conversation around developing effective criminal justice policy. She is also an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University School of Social Work and director of Women Transcending. In the community, Cheryl is a board member with the Women’s Community Justice Association, a co-convener of the Justice 4 Women’s Task-Force, an advisor with the Survivors Justice Project and the formerly incarcerated Women’s International Commission, a senior advisor with the Women & Justice Project, and co-founder and executive team member with Women Building Up. She holds a graduate degree in Urban Affairs and is the recipient of the Brian Fischer Award, Davis Putter scholarship, the Sister Mary Nerney Visionary Award and the Citizens against Recidivism Award.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.
