On Prison Towns and Ethnographic Entanglements

If we had any lingering doubts about whether collaborative ethnography could work — and especially whether it could work during a pandemic and in the midst of a nationwide racial reckoning in fall 2020 — a class session in late October dispelled them. several of our students had focused their participant observation that week on a protest in elmira, New York. elmira Correctional Facility, built in 1864 as the nation’s first reformatory, now serves as the initial processing center for all men incarcerated in New York state. By late October 2020, the prison was placed on lockdown when 40 percent of the approximately 1,800 residents tested positive for COVID-19. a coalition of local activists, including the rochester-based Black Lives Matter affiliate, organized simultaneous virtual and in-person demonstrations in elmira, rochester and albany to spotlight conditions on the inside and demand action. Our Zoom discussion unfolded as a student-led masterclass in perspectival analysis, as we pieced together a three-dimensional account of the protests and the local response through students’ overlapping fieldnotes, video clips, photos and interview snippets. several students had made the two-hour drive to elmira to march with signs while also taking notes and interviewing other participants, counter-protestors and bystanders. Other students had attended the simultaneous virtual protests in rochester and albany, allowing us to collectively contextualize the event statewide. a formerly incarcerated colleague who was auditing our class, Precious Bedell, provided additional behind-the-scenes stories, as one of the event organizers and speakers. One of our students, who had been incarcerated in elmira, was prohibited from attending due to the conditions of his parole, so he instead focused his research on critically analyzing how the events were portrayed on elmira nightly news programs. Our discussion that week built on a virtual class visit the previous month from anthropologist and elmira native andrea Morrell, whose work explores the relationship between elmira and its prison.1 Overall, this class session proved that being patient in allowing relationships off campus to build over time, trusting our students’ research instincts as co-producers’ of ethnographic material and pooling fieldwork data could yield unanticipated insights.