Joint Effort does immense amounts of work to build connections and trust with folx inside and out. Occasionally, we are asked by academics/artists/activists to connect them to people with lived expertise. We are glad that we can help folx connect with various projects so they can, hopefully, access avenues to express their vital and critical knowledge. And often, research projects are paid and this is a financial opportunity for people inside and out. But it is also so important to Joint Effort that academics/artists/activists connect in meaningful ways with the communities that they seek to research. That is, not with the extractive model of knowledge production.
While it is great that academics and researchers can offer to pay people with lived expertise of incarceration, Joint Effort also asks that researchers contribute to our community work. The ways that Joint Effort feels academics who benefit from connections with those with lived experience can contribute are:
- to actively support lobbying and legal campaigns of the moment.
- Joint Effort also asks for material/ monetary support to go towards our Pen Pack project and other projects that we run that redistribute resources to those who do have little to no access to knowledge production and interventions into public space.
Joint Effort recognizes that those with ‘lived expertise’ (empirical knowledge) of the carceral who may also be auto-didacts, should be front and center of the abolition movement. Our philosophy is that those whose knowledge is being sought, should determine how the knowledge is produced, what kind of projects and processes they are interested in. When writing on prison issues, we believe that co-writing and publishing is the ethical way to go. Projects that are done across intersectional differences (class, Indigeneity, race, gender identity, ability and otherness), and that between non-incarcerated and formerly or non-incarcerted folx need to emphasize the agency and self-organization of those who have endured the prison system. Those without prison experience have a lot to learn from those who do.
Joint Effort is also mindful of the confidentiality of community members, and especially the dangers around social media. When involving community members in academic/art/activist projects, the non-incarcerated public is not often aware of how dangerous social media can be with exposing details of people’s lives and in terms of being public on platforms like FB and so forth. Joint Effort does not show photo’s or names of people in the collective, unless they decide to do so themselves.
We are also mindful of the power dynamics in which of us can represent our work publicly (and thus garner social capital), and for those of us for whom it is a greater risk.
RESOURCES: by and for community
A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside
Rooted in Resistance: How movements and leaders blossom in the places they’re not supposed to grow
Gayle Horii’s Guidelines for Advocacy
Journal of Prisoners on Prisons
Briarpatch Magazine: the Prison Abolition Issue
Everything you were never taught about Canada’s prison systems
accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-industrial-complex
Joint Effort Collective 