Hunger, Meditation, Incarceration

Farah Godrej and Dana Simmons in Conversation

Wednesday, November 1, 2023, 10:30 am-noon

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The Event: A conversation about carceral ‘nutrition’ and carceral ‘wellness’, in which terms meant to denote sustenance, nourishment and health are repurposed by the mass incarceration complex as forms of punishment and behavior control. This conversation will consider the possibilities of building anti-carceral movements through practices of nourishment (such as mutual aid and hunger striking) and liberatory forms of yoga and meditation. It will also consider questions, concerns, and worries about how to confront carcerality as scholars and as responsible humans.

Farah Godrej is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. Her areas of research and teaching include Indian political thought, Gandhi’s political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization and comparative political theory.  She also studies contemporary issues such as environmental justice, food politics and mass incarceration. Her research appears in journals such as Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Theory & Event, The Review of Politics, and Polity, and she is the author of Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Her new book Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2022) is the winner of the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award from the American Political Science Association, and received honorable mentions for the 2023 American Association of Publishers (AAP) PROSE award for scholarly excellence and the 2023 Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence from the American Political Science Association.

Dana Simmons, a historian of science and technology, is Acting Chair of the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity at the University of California, Riverside. Her research interests include hunger, nutrition, the human sciences, feminist theory and technopolitics. Her book, Vital Minimum: Need, Science and Politics in Modern France, traces the history of the concept of the "vital minimum"--the living wage, a measure of physical and social needs. Dana’s essays appear in books and journals such as Engaging STS, Journal of Modern History, Representations, and Osiris. Her current book project, upon which this conversation draws, is about an enduring pattern in United States history: the production of hunger. On multiple occasions, from the nineteenth through the twentieth century, state agents and private (settler) citizens colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing and political control by deprivation. Food sources were destroyed, blocked, denied, altered or substituted in order to force people to obey, move, clear lands, accede to white power, and make way for new regimes of land and labor. Hunger served as an instrument to consolidate the modern United States. Central to this conversation will be a chapter of that book in progress (Fight, Don’t Starve: Hunger Made in U.S.A) entitled, “Carceral Hunger.”

This event is co-sponsored by UCR’s Health Humanities and Disability Justice Initiative and the Decolonizing Humanism(?) Initiative at the Center for Ideas and Society.