LIFE BESIDE BARS: A Dinner Salon | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Apr 24, 2025 6:00 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
Apr 24, 2025 6:00 pm
450K
Join author Heath Pearson and university students to explore the core ideas–carceral control, resistance, community, and joy– in Life beside Bars
A salon is a gathering of people brought together in a more informal and intimate setting, to discuss and share ideas around a central theme or topic. The salon format allows for a dynamic, open exchange of ideas among multiple participants rather than a top-down lecture given by a single person. This dinner salon will feature six university students and the author, to explore the core ideas—carceral control, resistance, community, and joy—in Life beside Bars.
Life beside Bars by Heath Pearson
Life beside Bars offers dynamic, interdependent community as the best hope for undoing the systems of confinement that reproduce capital in Cumberland County, New Jersey—a place that is home to three state prisons, one federal prison, and the regional jail. Pearson places today’s prisons within the region’s longer history of Lenape genocide, chattel slavery, Japanese American labor camps, and other forms of racialized punishment and carceral control. From this vantage, prisons appear not as the structural fix for the region’s failed political economy but as a continuation of the carceral principle that has always sustained it. This ongoing use of confinement, though, is merely the backdrop. Through ethnographic vignettes written in story form, Pearson offers an alternative history of the unruly and unexpected ways that people resist, get by, make money, find joy, and build radical social life in the small, unseen spaces beside large-scale confinement. As such, Pearson enriches our understanding of daily life in and around prisons—in any American community—while providing a kaleidoscope of possibilities for theorizing and organizing alternative paths.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Pearson will be signing following the program. There will be full dinner service throughout the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of LIFE BESIDE BARS will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Heath Pearson is an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology and Justice & Peace Studies at Georgetown University. His first book, Life beside Bars: Confinement & Capital in an American Prison Town, is available from Duke University Press, 2024. He is currently at work on a second book project titled, Streaming Man: How US Media Creates New Regimes of Race & Patriarchy for Unending War. He is the book and media reviews editor at Current Anthropology. He has published in numerous academic journals, as well as popular outlets like The Atlantic, VICE News, and NBC.com.
