Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons by Megan Sweeney

Author:Megan Sweeney
Format: pdf
Tags: In this book, Sweeney explores how some incarcerated women use the limited reading materials available to them to come to terms with their pasts, mediate their present experiences, and ready themselves for their futures. Drawing on extensive interviews with ninety-four women incarcerated in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Sweeney examines their reading practices and strategies and focuses particularly on their responses to fictional crime narratives, stories of victimization, and self-help and inspirational books. Sweeney draws attention to the experiences of African American women, expands the history of reading in prisons by exploring its shifting roles over time, and complicates the notion of bibliotherapy in the prison setting. She hopes to bring these women and their lives in prison into relief--to counter common narratives about crime or justice, to show them as readers and thinkers even when out of public sight, and to uncover their understandings of silence, agency, and resistance. While Sweeney sees reading programs as highly valuable to individual lives (especially as a practice of freedom in conditions of confinement), she explores the complicated relationship of these programs to prison reform. Also, she explores women's reading strategies and enhances our understanding of how women build meaning through stories and narratives both similar and different to their own lives. Sweeney's lively writing should benefit the book's reaching across many disciplines., Publisher:The University of North Carolina Press, Published:2010, Related ISBN:9780807833520, Language:English, OCLC:609694689


Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.