White Coats and Carceral Bodies: Ethnographies of Multiplicities Behind Bars

Abolitionist Science and Technology Studies (STS) research calls for methodological approaches robust enough to engage with the proliferation of racialized harms of mass incarceration in the United States. This chapter arises out of ethnographic research undertaken in clinics in two New York City jails (Rikers Island), one for males and the other for females. Having worked in public health in the jails nearly a decade prior, I returned to complete my ethnographic dissertation research as someone between an insider and an outsider. In these harsh spaces of multiple punitivities, ethnographic research becomes tangled in the carceralities within carceralities that limit access, and therefore, knowledge production, to greater and greater degrees. Given the dehumanizing setting and the proliferation of surveillances, ethnography was characterized by continual trust building and differentiating my research from the routine watching or monitoring by health and corrections authorities. Navigating the complexity of correctional clinics requires continual attending to the power dynamics between the health care and corrections professionals. This chapter suggests that feminist, abolitionist STS research calls for the disruption of the epistemologies (biomedical and criminology) of racialized mass incarceration and is reliant upon new approaches to carceral ethnography.