Brett Story
Brett Story is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. Her current project, After-spaces of the Prison: Neoliberal Prison Reform and the New Carceral State, which is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, investigates new carceral futures by critically examining prison reform strategies that have emerged or been augmented by the most recent financial crisis. Brett received her PhD in geography from the University of Toronto, and her academic work has been published or forthcoming in the journals Antipode, Human Geography, and Theoretical Criminology. She also works as a moving image artist and non-fiction filmmaker, for which she was the recipient of the Documentary Organization of Canada Institute’s 2014 New Visions Award. Her journalism has appeared in such outlets as CBC Radio and the Nation Magazine, and she was a nominee for the 2015 Ontario Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts.Brett is currently finishing her second feature-length documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, to be released in 2016.
Collected Work
Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America
Prison Land offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations—including property, work, gender, and race—enacted across various landscapes of American life. Prisons, Brett Story shows, are more than just buildings of incarceration bound to cycles of crime and punishment. Instead, she investigates the production of carceral power at a range of sites, from buses to coalfields and from blighted cities to urban financial hubs, to demonstrate how the organization of carceral space is ideologically and materially grounded in racial capitalism.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.