Charles Taylor Book Award Winner 2023: Farah Godrej, for Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State

Winner: Farah Godrej (University of California, Riverside) for Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Freedom Inside? is a deeply careful and caring book, humanizing the lived experiences of those subject to the systemic injustices of mass incarceration. In this unique ethnographic study of yoga and meditation in U.S. prisons, Godrej asks whether yogic traditions as they are taught in prisons pacify the incarcerated to accept their lot or urge them to resist the penal system’s messaging. Embedding herself in volunteer organizations teaching yoga and meditation in prisons, with the rare access to the incarceration system that this entailed, Godrej arrives at a more surprising and complex answer than that suggested by the binary of political passivity versus resistance. She argues that yoga practices foster dignity and internal strength for practitioners behind bars, enabling them to “pursue forms of inward-oriented spiritual pursuit denied (or possibly unknown) to many people in society” (278). This insight is developed through close engagement with the voices and ideas of those who have experienced confinement and those who volunteer to teach them yoga, making Freedom Inside? a model of the co-production of knowledge between the author and interlocutors. Through an immersive, embodied, and consistently self-reflexive examination, this book makes profound contributions to our understanding of personhood in incarceration and internal dimensions of resistance, as well as to interpretive ethnographic methods. Freedom Inside? speaks to audiences beyond academia, demonstrating both the potential and the limits of self-care practices in “total institutions” of social control.

Selection Committee:

Anastasia Shesterinina, chair (University of York)

Mona El-Ghobashy (New York University)

Ido Oren (University of Florida)