Ethan Blue

Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and around the world - overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and Californias penal systems. Each element of prison life - from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence - demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.

Engineering and War:Militarism, Ethics, Institutions, Alternatives

This book investigates the close connections between engineering and war, broadly understood, and the conceptual and structural barriers that face those who would seek to loosen those connections. It shows how military institutions and interests have long influenced engineering education, research, and practice and how they continue to shape the field in the present. The book also provides a generalized framework for responding to these influences useful to students and scholars of engineering, as well as reflective practitioners. The analysis draws on philosophy, history, critical theory, and technology studies to understand the connections between engineering and war and how they shape our very understandings of what engineering is and what it might be. After providing a review of diverse dimensions of engineering itself, the analysis shifts to different dimensions of the connections between engineering and war. First, it considers the ethics of war generally and then explores questions of integrity for engineering practitioners facing career decisions relating to war. Next, it considers the historical rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, especially from World War II to the present. Finally, it considers a range of responses to the militarization of engineering from those who seek to unsettle the status quo. Only by confronting the ethical, historical, and political consequences of engineering for warfare, this book argues, can engineering be sensibly reimagined.

Strange passages: carceral mobility and the liminal in the catastrophic history of American deportation

In the early twentieth century, the United States developed an integrated, continental deportation network based on rail travel. This new state apparatus would enable the restrictionists’ dream of immigration control and speed the elimination of those they deemed unfit for American life. It set a template for mass removal that would expand in the century to come. Scholars of immigrant detention and removal commonly employ Victor Turner’s concept of liminality to understand migrant experiences, but this paper suggests the need for an expanded theorization of the liminal as manifold rather than singular. Drawing on deportee case files and literature from the early twentieth century, this paper explores the complex, variegated and painful liminalities of the deportation journey. It argues that power affected deportees’ experience of space and time across different liminal zones and interprets the embodied catastrophe of deportation for migrant communities. If traumatic experiences reconfigure the meaning of time into a ‘before’ and ‘after’, deportation was an ongoing catastrophe that offered little sense of completion.

Seeing Ms. Dhu: Inquest, conquest, and (in)visibility in black women's deaths in custody

ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of vision and invisibility in Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and Coronial Inquests into deaths in custody. Ms. Dhu, a 22-year-old Yamatji woman, died in police custody in August 2014, in South Hedland, Western Australia, after being locked up for unpaid fines. Ms. Dhu’s final hours were captured by CCTV cameras built into South Hedland’s Police Station and Hospital, and that footage played a central role in the inquest into Ms. Dhu’s death. The article presents an account of the Coronial Inquest into Ms. Dhu’s death – examining both the footage and the manner of its presentation – to argue that the inquest was a contested theatre of power for the imposition of colonial patriarchy and settler sovereignty. But it also suggests that the modes of seeing Ms. Dhu can be transformed from a politics of neglect and carceral control to an ethos of care, community-building, decolonization, and decarceration, with ties stretching across Australia and to the Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, and Idle No More movements in North America.

From lynch mobs to the deportation state

This article explores the relationship between mob violence, immigration control, and the early twentieth-century US deportation regime. Scholars examining the decline of lynch violence in the South typically see modern criminal justice as a new incarnation of white, heteropatriarchal violence. But they have left the deportation apparatus, a conjoined element of a US carceral assemblage, unexamined. This article argues that modern border policing’s ostensibly bloodless removal absorbed anti-immigrant mob violence within its carceral-eliminatory system. As with the diminution of the Southern, anti-black lynch mob, invocations of legality in deportation proved better suited to the biopolitics of liberal capitalist modernity. Nevertheless, the deportation regime, bolstered by an extensive federal infrastructure, still targeted migrants of color, took aim against political radicals, and policed heteropatriarchy in its production of settler-colonial citizenship via the spatial elimination of so-called undesira...