Opening December 8, 2025 and running through January 2026
GalleryDAAS| Haven Hall| G648| Monday - Friday 10-4pm

This exhibit showcases stories of resistance, resilience, and hope, in the face of mass incarceration, police violence, immigrant detention, and systematic racial criminalization. Archives of Resistance presents art, prisoner correspondence, research publications, and archival documentation produced by the component projects of the Carceral State Project. These include: The Reckoning Project, Immigrant Justice Lab, Black & Pink at SPH, ICE in the Heartland, Critical Carceral Visualities, Policing & Social Justice HistoryLab, and Confronting Conditions of Confinement and Resistance. Artwork made by people in prison through Prison Creative Arts Project workshops is also on display.

The U-M Carceral State Project, housed within the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, brings impacted communities and advocacy organizations together with researchers from the University of Michigan. The CSP was first organized in 2018 and has since grown to involve over a dozen community and campus partners, many graduate students, and more than 400 undergraduate researchers.

Through public scholarship, creative expression, multimedia storytelling, and archival documentation, we highlight the lived experiences and persistent resistance of those impacted by criminalization, policing, incarceration, immigrant detention, and other forms of carceral control in the state of Michigan and beyond. The work presented in this exhibit represents only a sliver of the extensive research, art, advocacy, public engagement, and other products generated by the Carceral State Project over the years.