Date of Award

4-2025

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Interdisciplinary Studies

First Advisor

Dini Metro-Roland, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Paul Farber, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Fritz Allhoff, Ph.D.

Fourth Advisor

June Gothberg, Ph.D.

Keywords

Dehumanization, dialogue, hermeneutics, higher education, humanization, prison

Abstract

This body of work examines higher education with and for justice-involved people from a descriptive, theoretical, and empirical perspective—pulling together multiple disciplines and employing different methodologies from the humanities and social sciences. The investigation is written from a philosophical perspective via educational foundations and a social science perspective via qualitative research, including an examination of carceral higher education’s connections to teaching and experiential learning. This approach reflects the interdisciplinary nature of both the author’s degree program and the topic itself, which (as a field of academic inquiry) is part theoretical and part empirical (both qualitative and quantitative). The papers in this study are centered on the author’s experience founding, directing, and teaching for Western Michigan University’s college-in-prison program, Higher Education for the Justice-Involved, expanding outward from or orbiting around that fixed point. Over the course of seven or so years, the program has found its footing as an interdisciplinary liberal arts program that is firmly, unapologetically, and full-throatedly rooted in the humanities.

The pages that follow contain (1) a global introduction intended to motivate the need to spend time thinking about higher education in prison; (2) a qualitative study providing context on ways in which higher education in prison programs impact prison life and vice versa; (3) a theoretical and empirical paper on prison-university partnerships and the ways in which the prison context bears on the philosophical foundations of higher education in prison; (4) a theoretical paper which engages with contemporary educational theorists to examine the aims of carceral higher education, and the role that humanization might play in relation to them; (5) a theoretical paper on the dialogical structure of a humanistic higher education; (6) a theoretical paper on defending the use of transformative humanities literature in higher education; and (7) an empirical paper outlining a model of experiential learning for incarcerated students and non-incarcerated undergraduates which centers humanization as its main aim.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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