At this political moment within the university, mass incarceration and its most recognizable constituents, the prisoner and the prison, are at a predictable tipping point: the violence of inclusion. Neoliberal multiculturalism appears capacious enough to hold select representations of mass incarceration in its pursuit of new markets and deft enough to deploy this difference to whitewash other forms of institutional violence. Building from a long genealogy of scholarship and organizing that maps the coconstitutiveness of the university with our prison-industrial complex, Underground Work makes visible emergent lines and arrangements of power and resistance that inhibit and build abolition.

To that end, Work intervenes by problematizing formerly incarcerated subjectivity in the university. Institutional liberal promises cannot be delinked from processes of labor reproduction and racial capitalism. Beyond the neoliberal formation of higher education lies deeper contradictions endemic to enlightenment thought. Work relies on neo-Marxist thought, known as value form theory, to trouble the technologies of possessive individualism and value by suggesting that labor as the value form must be abolished. Work introduces new theory to explain the disciplining features of the carceral state vis-a-vis the political economy and convicted people’s relationship to it. Work claims that we, as convicted people, experience a shadow consciousness. Shadow consciousness exposes how our subjectivities are under threat, especially during moments of crisis and political resistance to state violence. Through an analysis of carcerality, labor and resistance, Work exposes the state sponsored projects intended to discipline our political agency in more detail. Despite the limitations that the framework exposes, we are not without agency. Because of the looming threat of rearrest, shadow consciousness understands the power of clandestine organizing. It is often in the shadows that formerly incarcerated and especially incarcerated people can organize. Though this framing borrows heavily from W. E. B. DuBois’ concept of double consciousness, shadow consciousness involves the purposeful evading of state surveillance as a political project, and this differentiates it from double consciousness.