Pedagogy and Process

Chapter 1 begins with the complicated classroom space in which the Kailua Prison Writing Project is situated. Simultaneously resistant to and complicit with dominant carceral tropes, this program's refusal of the therapeutic script lives alongside the embrace of the therapeutic. The pedagogies performed in the Tuesday and Friday classes, which are aligned with the Kailua Prison Writing Project's philosophy, are interrupted by repeated institutional intrusions. The classroom performs concurrently as a healing and disciplinary space in which the reinscription and rejection of programmatic and institutional neoliberal narratives coexist. As we experience the class itself and its multifarious interruptions, we attend to a community of writers that counters but never escapes the constraints of prison life.