Speaker Series: Michelle Brown

In the United States, the formation and ongoing articulation of tribal sovereignty has been inseparable from the logics and institutions of the settler colonial carceral state. This convergence—where Indigenous governance, legal recognition, and carceral power intersect—is not an aberration but rather a foundational structural nexus of U.S. law and carceral chokeholds, and therefore of significance broadly for our understandings of US carceral power and social movement struggles aimed at transformation. The landmark decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), which affirmed nearly half of Oklahoma as tribal territory, exemplifies this paradox: sovereignty is recognized but on the terms of the carceral state and its expansion. Drawing on sociolegal analysis grounded in critical Indigenous studies, carceral studies, and abolitionist thought, this paper traces how jurisdictional contests in Indian Country obscure the possibilities of ongoing Indigenous forms of governance rooted in relationality, non-punitive accountability, and deep forms of community safety. These legal border skirmishes raise urgent questions: What kind of sovereignty is affirmed when granted by the settler carceral state? How can Indigenous resurgence leverage sovereignty against carceral expansion? And what forms of justice might continue to emerge when Indigenous traditions and abolitionist geographies converge to imagine governance beyond and before the carceral state?

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Dr. Michelle Brown is a criminologist and sociolegal scholar with a joint PhD in Criminal Justice and American Studies. A Professor of Sociology in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Dr. Brown also serves as Co-Director of the Appalachian Justice Research Center. Her research and teaching areas include abolition and emergent forms of justice; carceral studies; law & society; and media, theory, and digital culture. Her work focuses on the rise of the carceral state and attendant social movements directed at ending mass incarceration, building more effective forms of community safety, and shifting media narratives on crime and punishment. Dr. Brown is the author of The Culture of Punishment(NYUP); co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture, the Palgrave MacMillan Crime, Media and Culture Book Series, and she is the former editor of the leading journal on crime and media: Crime Media Culture. Dr. Brown also has a forthcoming volume, Under the Gun: Criminology Goes Back to the Movies (NYUP). She was named Critical Criminologist of the Year in 2016 by the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. She is a first generation student: an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation (Tahlequah, OK) and of English-Scottish descent, with deep lineages in Appalachia on both sides of her family.