To Look But Not See: Felon Voting Rights, Critical Prison Theory, and the Politics of Inclusion

Event Date: 

Thursday, April 30, 2015 - 4:00pm

Event Location: 

  • The Lane Room (Ellison 3824)
  • Political Theory
  • PS 595 Event
  • Graduate Student Speaker Series

Reflecting on the current state of mass incarceration and drawing on my recently published book, Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism, I take up a specific question of the meaning of U.S. citizenship under the terms of felon disenfranchisement–the restriction of voting rights for convicted criminals. Looking at felon disenfranchisement as a symptomatic marker of the deep interconnection between punitive discourses and citizenship discourses in the United States, I argue here that even as the best of contemporary liberal political theory is able to give an important account how to understand such exclusions, it nevertheless demonstrates a paradigmatic limitation in how liberal theory approaches such exclusions. Working through Judith Shklar’s account of citizenship as public social standing, I argue that felon disenfranchisement continues to operate as part of the political system of white supremacy in the United States, and any move to address its radicalized character ought to embrace the broader agenda of prison abolition. Moreover, as a reflection on the current state of prison theory and philosophy in the academy, we must also reconstruct our theoretical and philosophical practice around the sties of prison struggle and the thought, voices, and strategic organizing of and by currently and formerly  incarcerated persons if our theory is going to be liberatory in form and content, and move beyond the limited framework of the politics of inclusion.

Andrew Dilts is Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the author of Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism (Fordham University Press, 2014), which gives a theoretical account of felon disenfranchisement as it has been practiced in the United States. He is currently at work on a book-length study of Michel Foucault's thought in relation to neoliberal economic theories of subjectivity, race, gender, and disability. He has published scholarly articles in Political Theory, Foucault Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, New Political Science, philoSOPHIA, and The Carceral Notebooks.

PS 595 Credit.