WHY LOOK AT PRISONS?
In their forthcoming book, Brett Story and Pooja Rangan redirect John Berger’s 1977 question about the spectacle of captured animals in an extended meditation on the fraught nexus of incarceration, documentary film, and the prison image. Drawing on their intersecting vantage points, the authors trace how some of the least interrogated reflexes of the documentary field—the logics of individual culpability, punitive consequence, transactional access, and cathartic resolution, all central to the true-crime boom and to documentary’s streaming-era reorganization—have metabolized the violence of mass incarceration as common sense. Their talk will present snapshots of two of these tendencies: the treatment of carceral access as an ethical good rather than a negotiated compromise with state power; and the feminist demand for narrative and social catharsis through punishment, with the following wager: that documentary has become a constitutive site of carceral worldbuilding, and is therefore a crucial battleground of abolitionist struggle.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Pooja Rangan is Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Amherst College and currently a Visiting Scholar at Visualizing Abolition, UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the ethics and politics of justice-driven documentary. Rangan is the author of The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability (Columbia University Press, 2025), Thinking with an Accent (coedited, University of California Press, 2023), and Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017). She is currently co-authoring a book with filmmaker Brett Story on documentary as a site of carceral world-building and abolitionist struggle. Rangan is the recipient of the Harry Levin and René Wellek book prizes and co-edits the Investigating Visible Evidence book series at Columbia.

Brett Story is an Emmy nominated and Oscar shortlisted filmmaker and writer whose work pushes the formal boundaries of political cinema. Her films have screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including at Sundance, New York Film Festival, CPH-DOX, and IDFA. She is the director of four feature films, including The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019), and the author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. The Hottest August was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and was called one of the best documentary films of 2019 by Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, among others. Her most recent feature documentary, Union (2024), co-directed with Stephen Maing, premiered at Sundance 2024 where it won the Special Jury Prize for Art of Change. Union has screened at over 100 festivals worldwide and was shortlisted for an Academy Award.

VISITOR INFORMATION
Room 115 is located in the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and payment is managed through ParkMobile (free after 4pm, except by the Oval). Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne White at jgwhite@stanford.edu. This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. 

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