Kristin Turney

PrisonPandemic is a digital archive of incarcerated voices in the COVID-19 pandemic. Since inception in 2020, the project has collaborated with community partners (VNON, Underground Scholars, Project Rebound, members of Essie Justice Group, Initiate Justice, Jail Guitar Doors, OC Friends of Detainees, Place4Grace, the Youth Offender Program) and 170 undergraduates to collect 2600 letters, 440 phone calls, and 300 artworks from people in 50-plus carceral facilities. The project is now transitioning from urgent story-collecting to sustainable story-processing and outreach, centering marginalized, under-represented voices. To advance the project’s pedagogical model of archiving and publicly engaged humanities for high school, college, and incarcerated students, the project team will institutionalize a replicable archive-based writing course, and develop pedagogical materials and partnerships with state prison facilities, state universities (including partners at UC Berkeley, Davis, Hastings, LA, Merced, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco), and Orange County high schools to increase awareness and accessibility.

UC Irvine’s PrisonPandemic collection consists of almost 5,000 letters and phone calls from incarcerated people describing their experiences while incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2023). The collection, and its details of carceral life, provides rare insight into one of our society’s greatest modern tragedies and how people caught in this tragedy made meaning of their experiences. One-sixth of the collection is currently available on a full-text searchable website. We propose to substantially expand the number of stories available on our website, increase accessibility of the stories, and expand outreach and awareness of the website – through an art installation of refurbished prison phones playing archived stories, a webinar, and an increased social media presence.