Elizabeth Harrington continues to dig into details of the federal budget and finds another questionable expense. She offers details in a Washington Free Beacon article.
The National Endowment for the Humanities is spending $250,000 on a traveling exhibit that displays “collective memories” of prisoners.
Funded through the agency’s Common Good” initiative, the exhibit is a joint effort by 20 universities with the purpose of engaging in a “national dialogue on incarceration.”
The traveling exhibit will kick off at the New School in New York City in April, and will then travel to each of the participating schools over the next three years. Universities involved in the project include Brown, Duke, Rutgers, and the University of Texas.
“Leading up to the launch of the exhibition, teams of students and people directly affected by incarceration from 20 cities will explore their communities’ experience with this pressing social issue,” a press release announcing the project said. “The work of each team will be compiled into a collective, multi-faceted portrait of incarceration, past and present, framed by the key questions these histories raise.”
“States of Incarceration” will include a “traveling multi-media exhibition, web platform, and curricula focusing on mass incarceration.”
The New School’s Humanities Action Lab said the project hopes to bring together “collective memories” of what it is like to be incarcerated.
“This grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, one of the nation’s largest funders of humanities programs, will enable us to explore how Americans have grappled with incarceration in the past and how it has profoundly shaped generations of people in each of our communities,” said Liz Sevcenko, director of the Humanities Action Lab.
