For the first time during the 2016-2017 year, the UNM Honors College has introduced a class exploring incarceration.
Assistant Professor Marygold Walsh-Dilley and Associate Professor Megan Jacobs are teaching the course through integrating two fields — sociology and art — and inviting guests to talk to students about their own personal experiences with incarceration.
Walsh-Dilley said the course is a block course, meaning it’s an unorthodox, year-long class co-taught by two different faculty members from very different fields.
“Megan is in fine arts — she specializes in photography — and I am a sociologist, and we come together to build an entire course opportunity for students around the theme of mass incarceration, from our respective disciplinary perspectives,” Walsh-Dilley said.
Walsh-Dilley said, within the class, her and Jacobs work hard to synthesize their respective fields so students have a broader and more realistic way to approach the subject of the class.
“We kind of model how that may integrate the type of readings we do,” she said. “Integrating both social scientific methods, like interviewing, with this incredible tool with photography. (We) marry the sociological information with images to convey in ways that are really provocative and profound.”
Jacobs said individuals who are incarcerated or detained in detention centers don’t just affect families, but communities as well.
“The writings the class has been doing, and the artists they have been looking at, address those issues in a range of ways,” Jacobs said.
Walsh-Dilley said what drives the class is analyzing why prison populations in the U.S. are so large compared to other countries, and comprised, in large part, of minority citizens.
“These groups are incarcerated for longer for smaller charges in a higher rate than the research suggests they should be. They don’t engage in crime or drug trafficking at a higher rate, but nonetheless they are incarcerated at a higher rate,” Walsh-Dilley said.
Walsh-Dilley said elements like guest speakers help students connect the research they are taught to the real world, in addition to creating a unique co-administered class that it is explicitly oriented in community engagement.
“Because we’re building up towards a service learning project in the spring, the field trips, the guest speakers — this is all part of our explicit intention to create this community engagement with our students,” she said.
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Jacobs said, with previous guest speakers — such as award-winning poet and novelist Jimmy Santiago Baca — students had the opportunity to hear from someone who was a melding of everything the class was looking into at a sociological level, but who also expresses those concepts in literature.
The class’ next guest speaker, award-winning photographer Richard Ross, will present his work during a public lecture on Monday in Dane Smith Hall.
Ross said being asked to be a guest speaker was a perfect fit, and through his visit he hopes to change legislation and inspire students to be more active in forming public policy.
“I want to help them understand the battles that you fight, and help teach them to heed the tools that I’ve learned in order to make things happens,” Ross said. “It's a pretty unusual world as an artist, to be able to say that an artist has had a very slight impact on public policy and legislation.”
The class works in collaboration with a handful of organizations as well, whose functions are pertinent to the concepts the curriculum covers. They include Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit that primarily specializes in providing education for incarcerated people, and Crossroads for Women, which assists individuals in readjustment to daily life following incarceration.
Along with these organizations, Walsh-Dilley said her and Jacobs are working with Ross and his organization, which is building a website around some of the photographic work he is doing.
“Students get to work in teams and propose their project on what they really want to work on, but we’re providing a lot of the support in terms of connecting them to organizations,” Walsh-Dilley said. “This whole semester we're filling them in on the background issues, so they can go into this project with sensitivity and knowledge about the issue.”
Jacobs said it is a mutually beneficial relationship — the organizations help the class, while the students also help and assist them.
“We’re really excited to be providing these opportunities for student volunteering and engagement,” Walsh-Dilley said. “A goal of ours in the class is to build empathy in our students for people that are different, people that are marginalized, for people who experience poverty or oppression in ways we may not.”
She said students are often finding personal connections through a single parent or family member who has experienced incarceration.
“We are very excited about the kind of discussion that has emerged through this and what this has allowed our students to do in terms of learning and growth,” she said.
Jacobs said the class is part of a bigger academically-focused shift at UNM, which is putting a newfound emphasis on service learning and being engaged in community.
“I would encourage people to go out into the community and find a community service partner that they feel an affinity with, incarceration or not,” she said. “I think giving back to the community helps you feel connected and teaches you real world skills.”
Nichole Harwood is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Nolidoli1.
