ABSTRACT
At the heart of Laura Ciolkowski's chapter is a feminist tale of radical pedagogy. The chapter centers a group of 12 students enrolled in Ciolkowski's gender and sexuality studies college course in a women's prison. These students were inspired to co-create their own academic journey after two-thirds of the course materials were unexpectedly confiscated in week two of the semester. This carceral “disappearing act” and the attempted erasure of the knowledge and dignity of the students in the class opened a unique opportunity for students to reimagine their own intellectual path and to rebuild rather than abandon the course. This expression of education as the practice of freedom is about exercising one's right to know, to learn, to speak, and to practice self-determination and autonomy even in the face of carceral forces that insist that people living behind bars, like the students in the class, are not entitled to exercise these fundamental rights. Ciolkowski's gender and sexuality studies college course without books prompts us to think about how education as the practice of freedom might support students in their feminist efforts to illuminate, navigate, and push back against the systems of power in which they must survive/thrive. It also illustrates how this work can help all of us to strengthen the muscles that carceral life is designed to atrophy—imagination and the belief in liberation, futurity, and change.
