Dr. BRETT STORY on How We Belong to Each Other /303
Photo by Tanya Trofymchuk of a shadowy silhouette depicting two hands– one reaching with fingers spread out and the other offering flowers through two bars.
This week, Ayana is joined by filmmaker and author Dr. Brett Story. Together, they ponder justice, accountability, and interconnection in a complex and rapidly changing world.
In this timely conversation, Brett begins by unpacking how carceral logics and conceptions of the “criminal” work, mark and dictate the world spatially, while at the same time explaining the socially-constructed nature of crime. Brett’s work examines the ways we individually and collectively metabolize our anxieties. What fantasies are we subscribing to about punishment and control (both of human behavior and of nature)? Through this lens, she makes connections across the broad issues of our current reality, from changing climates to criminal justice systems that were designed to enforce control rather than to produce true justice.
At the center of the conversation is the question of interdependence– emphasizing the need for community and collective action in the face of neoliberal individualism. Mass-incarceration and climate change are not crises of the individual, but of our culture. The abolitionist imagination may be the key to a collective future– as Brett reminds listeners that one can be both practical and utopian.
“We should think about the prison system not so much as a product of a criminal justice system, but actually as a manifestation of the anxieties of capitalist state and class who need and require to continue activities of exploitation.”
Photo of Brett Story
Brett Story is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker based in Toronto whose films have screened at festivals and theaters internationally. She is the director of the award winning feature documentaries The Hottest August (2019) and The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), both of which were also broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens. Brett holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, and her writing and criticism have been published widely. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.
♫ The music featured in this episode is “Fontallerta” by Jahawi Bertolli, “Almighty Song” by Ize Goodfriend and “Capitalist Blues” by Leyla McCalla.
Episode References
Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016)
Four Propositions on True Crime and Abolition by Pooja Rangan & Brett Story
Allen Feldman | NYU Steinhardt
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