Jen Sandler, Renita Thedvall & Cassandra Bensahih, September 12th 2024

Meetings are where people come together in time and space. We meet to heal, to build, to resist, to govern, to share, to change. People who have experienced state torture while in prison often use meetings to share their stories with those who have no such experiences. In order to listen well to them, to be moved, we must meet in person.

Anthropology has been quite slow to embrace Helen Schwartzman’s insight in The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and Communities (1989) that meetings offer a vital window into collective human projects and organizations. But community organizers, civic activists, and social movements—as well as corporate and political elites—have long understood the importance of meetings. We three authors of this paper have long engaged consciously with meetings as a key tool of our work—two of us (Jen and Renita) as ethnographers and teachers, and one of us (Cassandra) as a community organizer. After the pandemic changed how we meet, we have found that there is a great deal that can be learned from civic activists’ experiences of sharing firsthand stories of state violence in virtual and in-person meetings.

The struggle to end state-sanctioned torture 

Cassandra, herself a survivor of incarceration, currently coordinates Massachusetts Against Solitary Confinement (MASC), a coalition project of UU Mass Action. She works collectively with survivors of incarceration and solitary confinement toward what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “non-reformist reforms,” reforms that reduce the extent and harms of incarceration while supporting and empowering people directly affected.

Abolitionist scholars and activists in the United States (most famously Michelle Alexander, although the abolitionist coalition Critical Resistance articulated a powerful abolitionist analysis from decades prior) have long noted that mass incarceration is the backbone of the U.S. “racial caste system.” MASC, and many other organizations led by people with direct experience of incarceration, do something somewhat different. They begin with attention to the torture and violence that characterizes each human being’s experience within this unjust system. Cassandra, like others who spend their lives working with incarcerated people, has heard thousands of stories illustrating how U.S. prisons and jails are environments of violence and retaliation, not rehabilitation. Many if not most prisons lack professionalism and meaningful care. Solitary confinement is one of the most obvious and ubiquitous state-sanctioned practices of carceral dehumanization.

Solitary confinement is torture, as defined by the United Nations and many of the world’s human rights organizations. Isolating people in solitary confinement often enables other (unsanctioned but nonetheless ubiquitous) abusive practices, including many forms of physical, psychological, and sexual violence. Survivors of solitary confinement experience severe mental health challenges that affect them for the rest of their lives; many do not survive. A 2023 report showed that the experience of solitary confinement is far more prevalent than most previous estimates: for at least 22 hours each day, at least 122,840 people experience solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails. The vast majority have been put in solitary for non-violent reasons. But while national watchdog and advocacy groups including Solitary Watch and Unlock the Box have tirelessly compiled statistics and testimonies to make transparent this torture system, their organizers know that actually ending state torture requires far more than the publishing of truths; it requires direct engagement with people who have the power to end it.

MASC often shares numbers and facts about solitary confinement. But MASC members also feel ambivalent about the effectiveness of numbers and facts alone to sway people in power. Sometimes it’s not about numbers, but about individuals changing their understanding. We can quote facts all day—not enough guards, not enough programming. We have numbers and facts to share, but the power is in individual stories. One story can change someone’s perspective. So we tell our stories: one of them is going to hit somebody right in their heart. We have seen how administrators and guards hide behind numbers. Sharing the truths of impacted people’s experiences is what can change things.

Meetings to Hold the Listening

Story telling, of course, does not require meeting at all. Stories can be told through video, in written narrative, on podcasts, in art or poetry. The irreplaceable role of the meeting for spurring policy change is to hold the listening, to open a space of collective possibility.

Two of us (Jen and Cassandra) had a dynamic, story-filled meeting over coffee in 2014, and have spent the last ten years in a pedagogical partnership that involves bringing students from anthropology courses run by the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation (UACT) to support formerly incarcerated people in their work against carceral violence. Jen has long observed that Cassandra’s work as coordinator of MASC largely involves developing and navigating a varied landscape of meetings where people who have survived solitary confinement can share their stories with people who do not know the system as they do. Telling their own stories in an environment where they are meaningfully heard builds the power and agency of people who have endured dehumanizing and torturous experiences at the hands of the state.

Another pair of us (Renita and Jen) initiated the Meeting Ethnography project back in 2013. Based on a series of international symposia with ethnographers working all over the world, we developed a conceptual framework for understanding meetings in three ways: as architecture, practices of circulation, and maker. After the pandemic irrevocably shifted how people meet, we wondered what this framework enables us to understand about what we have come to call the “zoomiverse” rupture and the current “pluriverse” meeting world. MASC’s experiences and Cassandra’s reflections on virtual and in-person meetings highlight the importance of a meeting’s structure, or architecture, for holding particular listening practices.

The major difference between zoomiverse and in-person meeting architectures is that the zoomiverse is a multiverse, a meeting that holds many worlds. Virtual meetings structure one largely shared world of faces, voices, and text in the online platform. But the zoomiverse meeting space-time is also comprised of all the places and temporalities of each individual participant. The zoomiverse is both hyper-standardized within the actual platform, and also hyper-individualized as everyone simultaneously experiences an individual physical world with distinct colors, smells, sounds, objects, people, and temporal rhythms. We are literally each in our own individual world when we are in a virtual meeting. Without sanction or stigma, each person can easily tune into any of the “worlds” outside the shared meeting world.

Bringing people in different worlds together with ease can be a wonderful thing, of course. MASC used the zoomiverse meeting architecture to good effect to connect survivors of incarceration and solitary confinement with one another, and with family members and allies intent on learning from them. For example, during the zoomiverse years, Cassandra and MASC members were able to connect more deeply with Unlock the Boxand NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture), both national networks leading the work to end solitary confinement. The ease during lockdown of connecting people across time and space enabled strategic connections to take shape among survivors of incarceration and solitary confinement across the country.

But how did the zoomiverse function for MASC’s storytelling and listening-based campaigns to end solitary confinement in Massachusetts?

When the zoomiverse architecture became ubiquitous, the practices of circulation shifted. Instead of bodies, things, and movements circulating in rooms, faces were circulated on screens. The perpetually negotiated patter of human voices in a meeting room gave way (with the mute button) to isolated sequential sharing of voices.

Stories of firsthand experiences of solitary confinement offer graphic illustrations of uncomfortable, painful truths about public institutions. For people who have never experienced or truly listened to the experiences of such state torture, the stories MASC leaders tell can provoke significant discomfort. But the zoomiverse architecture circulates almost infinite practices of avoiding discomfort. In MASC’s Zoom meetings with allies and prison administrators, survivors told the same firsthand stories as they do in in-person meetings. But in our experience and review of MASC Zoom meetings, the listening practices were different. People can (and do) turn off their cameras. They can look elsewhere, listen elsewhere. Participants cannot meaningfully witness one another’s listening, and cannot co-regulate their bodily reactions.

The zoomiverse architecture makes the circulation of deep listening practices almost impossible. The MASC member on the screen tells their painful and violent personal story in an act of faith that listening might move people to act, and yet an outsider-listener can easily, without incurring stigma or even notice, cope with their discomfort by tuning out partly or completely.

After the lockdown period had eased, in early 2022, Jen and her students accompanied Cassandra and MASC leaders in their first return to in-person meetings at the Massachusetts State House. Our group included the two of us, a MASC member, seven university students, and another MASC member, Romilda, joining on speakerphone. As we sat together with business-suited legislators and their staff, we felt the significance of our bodies negotiating arrangement in a singular conference room. Unlike Zoom, these meetings circulated direct eye contact: we were people looking at people looking at people (or clearly choosing not to look). Together, we created space for MASC members to tell graphic story after story of state torture. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do but listen together. We noticed one another’s breathing. We shifted in our seats. We sensed the discomfort of the suited targets of the meeting, and they sensed our sensing and made visible efforts to control their bodies, breathing, and faces. Each of us was nowhere else but in the room, together, witnessing survivors’ stories, witnessing each other’s witnessing. Although we cannot be sure what listeners were thinking, we all experienced and observed one another’s discomfort in those State House meeting rooms.

What Uncomfortable Meetings Might Make

But what do such discomfort-ridden meetings do, and how do they differ from story-sharing meetings in the zoomiverse? Our last concept of meetings as makers helps us to consider this question.

Meetings in the zoomiverse are able to bridge space-times, connecting people not only across locations but across morning time and afternoon time, child-care time and work time, sick time and well time, full-attention time and multi-tasking time. But meetings in the zoomiverse are far less able to bridge divides between those with different stakes in the issue at hand. From the comfort of one’s own home, a story of torture can be so easily flattened, tuned out, muted. We can shake our heads, look at the birds, grab some coffee, absently check email. We can assure ourselves that we already know the criminal justice system needs reform. We can ease our own discomfort, protect our own hearts.

MASC members’ firsthand stories open a space of possibility. They describe a state institution that people think they know—that is, the criminal justice system, perhaps in need of reform—as an utterly distinct thing: aninhumane torture system, which must cease its torture. This gap in how one knows an institution cannot be bridged by logic alone. If we want a meeting to make a truly new understanding that might forge some form of solidarity (that is, accountable relationships) across salient differences, we must meet in person where we can witness one another’s discomfort, hear one another’s breathing, experience time and place together, and overlap our sighs, gasps, and nervous laughter.

Formerly incarcerated people use their time and energy to meet and share their stories with a wide range of people, from prison administrators to elected officials to liberal activists. Their hope is that these meetings will mobilize each of us to shake off our complicity and use our particular power—whether to plan or attend a protest, call a representative, co-sponsor a bill, vote a bill out of committee, appoint particular people, or speak up in our particular forums—to advance the struggle to end solitary confinement and other forms of state torture. In-person meetings enable MASC members to humanize, conscientize, and—they hope—ultimately mobilize their most unwitting oppressors.