Shreya Subramani

Faculty Fellow

Shreya Subramani is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor of Law & Society at CUNY John Jay College. Her ethnographic research explores how progressive criminal justice reform is productive of novel racializing processes that transform and expand carceral geographies in New Orleans. As a CPCP faculty fellow, Subramani will be workshopping her current book project. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2019) in New Orleans, her book is a historical materialist critique of contemporary criminal justice reform as passive revolution. She elaborates the fragmentations and contradictions emergent in what is parochially referred to as “the reentry space,” a private-public institutional infrastructure for policy and service provisioning designed to facilitate the reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals back into city life. Doing so, reveals a terrain of political struggle that opens onto our contemporary conjuncture of racial capitalism and its manifold crises as well as their ongoing regulation and transformation.

Connected Events

Abolition and/as Activism – 2024 CPCP Annual Conference

May 3, 2024

Participating Years

2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail. What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?