Past Projects
“Higher Education in Prison” Email List (2010-2024) In 2010, as a graduate assistant for Professor Rebecca Ginsburg at the University of Illinois, I organized a national meeting on higher education in prison (HEP). After the conference, I set up an email listserv to facilitate dialogue among HEP organizers after the conference.
The National Conference on Higher Education in Prison (NCHEP) was organized by a rotating cast of HEP programs in the years that followed; events were announced on the national listserv and the conversation grew as more members subscribed to the list. With an annual meeting and a common channel for communication, our collective sense of a HEP “field” began to grow. This conversation among HEP programs led to the creation of the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison (AHEP), which has hosted the annual NCHEP conference in 2017.
In March 2024, AHEP took over the national email listserv and I signed off. The list had continued to grow throughout this time, and had I remained its lone administrator. Subscribers included HEP programs, non-profits, government officials, funders, and increasingly the alumni of HEP programs who had returned to the community and were taking on leadership roles in the field. When I handed over the listserv to AHEP, it had 1,800 subscribers, and I had administrated the list for almost 14 years.
Cymbal Timelines (2010 – 2012) is a website I made to help cymbal users date (and thus compare) their cymbals. It is part of a larger project of researching the cultural history of the drumset, as an amalgam of instruments from the colonial satellite, hybridized and reinvented in popular cultural form. Since 2012, this page has become one of the most cited references for dating vintage percussion instruments.
Education Justice Project (2007-2013) I worked for the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois from August 2007 to May 2011. The mission of the Education Justice Project (EJP) is to build a model college-in-prison program that demonstrates the positive impacts of higher education upon incarcerated people, their families, the communities from which they come, and society as a whole. During my work as a graduate assistant, I took on many roles: maintaining the website, fundraising, planning, recruiting, teaching, etc. In October 2010, I organized a national meeting entitled Higher Education in Prison with EJP at the University of Illinois. It was a national conference of college educators and organizers for higher education in prisons in the United States. After I graduated, I served on the advisory board for the project, helped with EJP’s sustainability initiative, and taught a course on Educational Philosophy for the program in 2013.
School for Designing a Society (2003-2008) is a grassroots school for social change based out of Urbana, IL. I taught a permaculture class at the school in the Fall of 2002, and the Spring of 2003. In 2004, I taught “Permaculture and Cybernetics” at the summer school and became the Organizer for the summer school of 2005. From 2006 through 2008 I organized the summer, fall and spring school sessions, as Director of the school. In 2009 I organized the summer school while transitioning out of the Director’s role. In 2010 I returned as a guest instructor for a special project at The Evergreen State College.
Urbana Permaculture Project (2000-2006) was a non-commercial, multi-site, permaculture education project based out of Urbana, Illinois. This was my main project for several years, and its content reflected the fierce zaniness of my early twenties. The project’s website was launched in 2001 and thus reflects 2001 early-web style design – e.g. black&white gifs, HTML 4.0 and local ISP hosting(!) It was refurbished and posted as a legacy site in 2011, with images and chronological format of past events to mimic the current blog-influenced look of the internet.