Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

**On sabbatical AY 2026-2027**

My research is situated within the interdisciplinary fields of carceral geography, racial capitalism, and social movements with a particular focus on the US and Gulf South. My research examines how periods of political, economic, and environmental crises can create conditions of possibility for carceral state expansions as well as for dismantling punitive power that stretch us towards new geographies of freedom. Central to my work as a scholar is committed engagement and dialogue with social movements which has informed my research process as well as my prioritization of both academic and public-facing venues for my research. 

My first book Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (UNC Press, 2023) tracks the multiscalar formation and contestation of the Louisiana carceral state from the 1970s to the present day. I analyze the interchange between Louisiana’s turn to mass incarceration, the imperatives of racial capitalism, and the development of grassroots organizing by those communities targeted for heightened surveillance, policing, and imprisonment along lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, age, and geography. Through archival research, oral histories, and in-depth ethnographic research, I examine how Louisiana has expanded and consolidated its carceral infrastructure in response to multiscalar political economic crises and how it has adapted its carceral capacities when oppositional movements gain traction. I illuminate how Louisiana's rise as an epicenter of mass incarceration was produced through the interplay between different facets of punitive state power (prisons, jails, policing) in tandem with the global booms and busts of the oil economy and the rise of tourism capitalism. Yet, these periods of crises produce not only intensified carceral geographies but have dialectically formed spaces of possibility for oppositional politics, social movements, and coalition-building in the Black Radical Tradition. From prisoners instigating federal lawsuits, to community organizers building coalitions to shrink the New Orleans jail in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to young Black trans women aligning with Latinx reconstruction workers to contest racialized and gendered policing, grassroots movements have won victories that stretch us towards new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy.

I also co-edited with Jack Norton and Judah Schept the volume The Jail Is Everywhere: Organizing Against the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books, 2024), which examines how jailing has become a pivot point of anti-carceral activism across the United States. Bringing together contributions from academics and activists, this collection explores the economic, political and ideological mechanisms that jail underwrite expansion efforts – from the incarceration of ICE prisoners in local jails to carceral humanism arguments for “gender-responsive” jails –  as well as how anti-jail campaigns have become a frontline against mass incarceration in rural counties and small towns, mid-sized cities, and major metropolitan areas. 

I am currently at work on two new projects: 

The first is focused on carceral and anti-carceral responses to climate change with a focus on hurricane disasters. Through concentrating on the enmeshment of multi-scalar carceral statecraft and climate policy – from the development of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the intensification of militarized police power in the wake of disasters, I examine how punitive power is extended and contested before, during, and after climate disasters. At the same time, I will interrogate how climate justice organizations are integrating anti-carceral politics into their climate visions, how their activism is spurring insights into the workings of disaster racism, capitalism, and colonialism.

The second project is a consideration of the development of ICE from its founding to the present. This work hones in on the legal, political, and financial mechanisms underlying immigration enforcement and the material and ideological conditions under which ICE’s powers to police, detain, and deport have grown. In particular, this project considers how ICE has developed in relationship to the criminal legal system from the conversion of shuttered prisons into detention centers to increased collaborations between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement.