Dr. Kolleen Duley

Kolleen received her doctorate from the UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Her dissertation, Raze the Bar[s]: ‘Gender Responsive’ Prison Reform, Criminalizing Race, and Abolishing the Carceral State tracks the study of gender and criminality and critiques problematic mobilizations of gender and the plight of people in women’s prisons in prison law and reform efforts. Kolleen is a member of the NYS Bar Association and she serves as a coordinating attorney with Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, providing pro bono advocacy for indigent people imprisoned in New York State. Both her academic endeavors and grassroots social justice efforts reflect Kolleen’s longstanding commitment to engaging in prison abolitionist social justice strategies — following calls put forth by people in prison and their survivors—in order to address deleterious conditions of confinement inside prisons without expanding the reach of the carceral state.

While shifting ‘betwixt and between’ academia and movement building, Kolleen remains committed to all-around rabble-rousing. She is currently working on a book project, Theorizing in the Flesh: Prisons, Harm, and the Afterlife of Violence, which proffers alternative analytics for thinking through prisoners’ entanglements with self-harm and (re)positions the “messiness” of what happens when you live under conditions of extreme subjection using theories of enfleshment, erotics, necropolitics, (dis)ability/debility, and racializing assemblages of the human. Kolleen spends her spare time living and working with her family on a small organic vegetable farm in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate N.Y.