While all Laidlaw Scholars will be presenting their research at the Columbia Undergraduate Research Symposium in the fall, what are the more immediate expectations that you have for your research? Are you writing a paper? Will your research be part of a larger scientific study? Do you hope to produce an annotated bibliography that you reflect on down the line? Is your research now the first phase of a project you’ll continue to work on throughout the year, and/or next summer? Now that we are nearing the one month mark of the program, please write about your expectations for your research.
I plan to write a 12-15 page research paper, which I will continue iterating and editing after the program ends to submit to journals. I am working on an independent project, so it is entirely up to me how much longer I work on the project, but I plan to have a working draft complete by the end of these six weeks. I plan to maintain my relationship with my faculty mentor into the school year, given that I will be taking her class next semester, and I hope to support her in any future research projects. I have significantly narrowed down my research due to the short duration of the program, but I could theoretically keep expanding my scope and including more authors to enrich and specify my argument further afterward.
Why does your research matter? Explain the significance of the question you are investigating, and why you are interested in it.
At the beginning of the program, I planned to study the prison autobiography as a whole and make an argument about what it means to write one's life story in prison. My research has now narrowed down to the prison letter and its political potential, rather than attempting to canonize prison writing and constrain it to the taxonomies of genre. I am curious about incarcerated writing in the epistolary format because it best reflects the immediacy and urgency of the situation, serving as a sort of proof of life, given that many of these individuals did not know if the next day would be their last. These letters are also distinctly situated in the repressive prison context, as opposed to a memoir written retrospectively after release, portraying the censorship and restrictions they face in getting the words on the page and sent out. George Jackson, for instance, would write in his letters about his uncertainty of ever being read. This tenuousness creates an effect of meta-textuality, where one can closely observe the interaction between the writer and their own writing; Jackson will tell the recipient what order to read his letters in, and after knowing his letters will be published, asks for certain parts to be edited out. You essentially see the process and progress of writing in the writing. Furthermore, as a third party reading only the letters being sent out by incarcerated people to their loved ones, I view an experience of being held incommunicado. The writing is steadfast yet incredibly fragile — the words could be literally thrown out or ignored, and the writer relies on their one recipient's attention for the chance of ever being heard. In reading the letters, I am reading something that is a creative output, a practical necessity, and an object of surveillance. To some extent, it is as much the writers' product as it is the prison officials' bastardization of it.
This is all to say, I believe my research is significant because it is, for some incarcerated writers, their only means of communication, and the closest they can get to delivering their own narrative. I am intrigued by not only the content but the form, how their thoughts manifest on paper, and the limitations of this execution, which is why I am studying their personal letters rather than their essays or political treatises. These individuals are already known for their revolutionary ideologies; I want to know what it took for them to express and form their beliefs. I want to understand the person behind the icon and how the letter has served this radical purpose that is both illuminating and inevitably incomplete.