Medical Anthropology and Global Health Seminar Series is pleased to present “Inside the Carceral Church: The Impact of Faith-Based Prison Ministries in American Prisons”

Tanya Erzen, Ph.D., Associate Research Professor

Department of Religion/Gender Studies
University of Puget Sound
Director Freedom Education Project Puget Sound

In prisons throughout the United States, punishment and religious revivalism are occurring simultaneously. Faith-based ministries have become a dominant force in American prisons, operating under the logic that religious conversion and redemption will transform prisoners into new human beings. Based on her recent book, Erzen addresses the political and psychological consequences Christian ministries within a punitive system of mass incarceration.  She also discusses how people in prison practice religion in a space of coercion and discipline, the implications of the state’s promotion of Christianity over other religious traditions, and how faith-based programs may enable forms of transformation and community organizing.

Dr. Tanya Erzen is Associate Research Professor in Religion and Gender Queer Studies at The University of Puget Sound.  Her research focuses on American religion as it intersects with ethnography, gender and sexuality studies, and critical prison studies. In 2016 Dr. Erzen published the book God in Captivity: The rise of faith-based ministries in the age of mass incarceration (Beacon Press). In this book she discusses in rich ethnographic detail the rise of religious organizations in cash-strapped and overcrowded state and federal prisons in the United States. Previously, she published Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian conversions in the ex-gay movement (University of California Press, 2006) and co-authored Zero Tolerance: Quality of life and the new police brutality in New York City (New York University Press, 2001). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including American Quarterly, The Boston Globe, and PLMA. Dr. Erzen is the executive director of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS), which is an organization that offers college classes to women, transgender, and gender nonconforming people in Washington State prisons.

The Carpentries is a non-profit volunteer organization whose members teach researchers how to use computing tools and tools for management, analysis and visualization of data.

The eScience Institute is holding a Software Carpentry workshop on January 15th – 18th (9 AM – noon each day) in the WRF Data Science Studio. The workshop focuses on software tools to make researchers more effective, allowing them to automate research tasks, automatically track their research over time, and use programming in Python to accelerate their research, and make it more reproducible.

For details, and to register for our upcoming workshop, please refer to the the following webpage: https://uwescience.github.io/2019-01-15-uw/.

Graham Pruss
Sociocultural Anthropology PhD

Over half of the people who sleep on the streets of Seattle and King County inhabit a vehicle. The number of people who sleep in vehicles throughout King County rose by 383% from 2008 to 2018 – nearly quadrupling from 881 to 3,372. However, there are almost no programs offering parking spaces to connect vehicle residents with services that “end homelessness.” Why?

To answer this question, Graham Pruss presents his eight-years of ethnographic research in Seattle. Pruss shows how vehicle residency can be an adaptive response to displacement, and how mobility is weaponized to disaffiliate vehicle-homes. His archival research documents vehicle residency as a growing response to unaffordable housing in communities across the country, suggesting the possibility of a social nomadic turn: an emergent culture of a “New American Traveler.”

LAUREL ECKHOUSE, University of Denver

Scholars in several fields, including quantitative methodologists, legal scholars, and theoretically oriented criminologists, have launched robust debates about the fairness of quantitative risk assessment. As the Supreme Court considers addressing constitutional questions on the issue, we propose a framework for understanding the relationships among these debates: layers of bias. In the top layer, we identify challenges to fairness within the risk-assessment models themselves. We explain types of statistical fairness and the tradeoffs between them. The second layer covers biases embedded in data. Using data from a racially biased criminal justice system can lead to unmeasurable biases in both risk scores and outcome measures. The final layer engages conceptual problems with risk models: is it fair to make criminal justice decisions about individuals based on groups? We show that each layer depends on the layers below it: without assurances about the foundational layers, the fairness of the top layers is irrelevant.

Piano Professor Robin McCabe produces this quarterly series highlighting music by composers affected by diasporas and migrations.  Each performance includes a pre-concert lecture by a UW faculty scholar. The fall quarter performance includes UW music students performing works by Bartok, Chopin, Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Castelnuevo-Tedesco, as well as a pre-concert lecture by UW Music History faculty member Jon Hanford.

Pre-concert lecture: John Hanford, UW Music History:
“A Banquet of Antededent(s) and Consequences”

FREE admission.

The Homelessness Research Initiative is organizing a meeting for faculty members who may be interested in applying for a Population Health Initiative Pilot Research Grant. The goal is to brainstorm ideas and potentially foster collaborations for a project related to homelessness for this upcoming grant cycle.

This meeting will take place on November 28th from 3-4pm in Savery Hall 169.

We are trying to gauge interest and decide where to hold this meeting, thus your RSVP is greatly appreciated!

Click here to RSVP to the Population Health Initiative Pilot Research Grant Meeting

Feel free to reach out to Hope Freije at hfreije@uw.edu with any questions you may have.

Sharing economy platforms have rapidly disrupted and transformed many traditional markets. Companies such as AirBnB, in the housing market, and Uber, in the ride-sharing space, have thrived by creating opportunities for so-called “micro-entrepreneurs”, allowing them to leverage existing personal assets, such as a spare room or car, to generate additional income. While often heralded as an opportunity to reduce income inequality, opening opportunities through technology to a much larger segment of the population, there is however a latent concern that these platforms are in practice not as inclusive as advertised. In this talk I will present a case study based on AirBnB  listings in Chicago and examine a number of different dimensions regarding the hosts, their property and the environment within which they operate. Specifically I show who the hosts are by detecting hosts’ ethnicity, gender and age using images posted publicly on the site. I quantify how these hosts present their properties by measuring the aesthetic score of the main listing photographs using a deep learning algorithm. The results suggest an ethnical discrepancy that affects minorities from lower socio-economic backgrounds, even when taking into account location and other attributes such as price of AirBnB listings. The findings also suggest that a wider range of factors, such as poorer pictures of listings, maybe affecting the inclusion and that could be corrected with internal policies and assistance of the platform owners.