Telling Our Own Stories: Inside the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Retreat & Showcase - Incite at Columbia University

From June 8th to June 11th 2026, the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab hosted our retreat, gathering 26 of our partners from around the country, including members of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CA), Women Transcending (NYC), Barred Business (GA), Chicago Torture Justice Center, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, and Empowerment Avenue, our archival partners at Invisible Institute (IL), commissioning artist, and student lab members. Throughout this retreat, we invited members of our partner organizations for a couple days to bond and learn about each other’s work in celebration of the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Project.

During the retreat, partners presented about work and oral history collection processes, attended tours of the Studio Museum and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and embraced team building through candle making, a poetry workshop, and attending a Broadway show. The retreat allowed partners time to trace the interconnectedness of their work in different locales and to think through the future use of this oral history archive.

On June 10th 2026, our retreat culminated with our Movements Against Mass Incarceration Celebration & Showcase at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Our project partners and invited guests joined us for an evening of food, music, and conversation as we celebrated the pre-release of the Movements Against Mass Incarceration oral history archive, centering the work of justice impacted organizers, activists, and artists from around the country who've made this archive possible. We celebrated with three panels. 

The first panel, titled “Reflections,” was a conversation on the process of creating oral history and what it means for the histories we tell today and into the future, featuring Michelle Daniel Jones of Women Transcending, LaTanya Jenifor-Sublett of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, Romarilyn Ralston of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Elizabeth Todd-Breland of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, and Elizabeth Hinton as moderator. Together, the speakers reflected on collecting oral histories on movements against mass incarceration, what Hinton described as “the premier social justice movement of the 21st century.” 

In response to a question about the importance of those in the archive telling movement histories on their own terms, Elizabeth Todd-Breland described the importance of the work of documenting survivors of police torture in Chicago:

“When survivors were telling their stories for decades, they were not believed. They were told that they were lying. So in fact, the actual collection and survivors being able to tell their stories on their own terms and holding that and archiving that is the work. The work of creating that history, elevating that history … There are things that feel unique about our moment historically and there are things that echo and rhyme with many other moments in the history of this country, the history of the world. But I think what you see from the tenacity and the refusal of folks who for so long were denied, to continue to tell their story proves a different way, right? It shows a different way for us to honor these histories, lift them up, and provide a number of unlimited potential futures.”

What followed was a moving discussion on the power of narrators owning their stories and being honored in their truth, of the democratization of the stories we uplift, and of storytelling as a catalyst for collective freedom.

From there, we turned to the “Interventions” panel, a conversation about the importance of art across social movements, featuring speakers including Kwaneta Harris with Rahsaan Thomas of Empowerment Avenue, Alice Kim of the Beyond Prisons Initiative, Renaldo Hudson of the Death Penalty Project, and Samora Pinderhughes of The Healing Project.

Rahsaan Thomas, reflecting on the importance and economic power of justice impacted people having creative ownership over their stories, recounts, 

“I kept being in everybody's documentary. And they’re amazing documentaries, they’re dope, they’re all award-winning. And the common denominator isn’t the filmmakers, it’s us. And I imagined, What if we had that economic empowerment? What if we controlled the narrative?"

The conversation followed, as each panelist described the intersections of their art and their organizing against the different facets of mass incarceration. Describing the importance of art towards fortifying his and others’ spirits while incarcerated, Renaldo stated, 

“I am a staunch believer that art is crucial in the movement to change things and the narratives around the death penalty … That’s why my interviews around the “Death Penalty Project: From the Inside Out” are aimed at how we end the death penalty in the United States and not keep pushing it to the side. So art is part of my expression, my advocacy work, and I learned that there’s few things more powerful than a moving expression of art.”

Panelists had a powerful conversation about art as a social intervention and catalyst for healing, the personal and political roots of their work, and the uses of oral histories in the creative process. 

We then turned to a moving performance from Samora Pinderhughes and The Healing Project from their upcoming project titled ”I Hope This Finds You Well,” a combination of oral history excerpts and songs inspired by interviews they conducted with people across the country. Samora specifically cited the Alan Llomax archival collection as his first recollection hearing songs from incarcerated peoples, and the particular tensions of understanding history through extractive archival methods. Through song, the Healing Project invited us to think through how history moves through sound, and how both the content and sound of the voice changes how we understand and feel the histories impacting our lives. 

Our last panel of the evening, titled “Activations,” was a conversation on how to make the archives publicly accessible catalysts for action, featuring Mariame Kaba, Jen Ash of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Bridgette Simpson of Barred Business, and moderated by Maira Khwaja of the Invisible Institute. 

Simpson, reflecting on the ways that the Barred Business oral history project, “Unlikely Heroes," provides activation towards narrative change, states;

“As I listened to all of the oral histories … we were able to see the stark similarities from Chicago to Georgia to Louisiana, and the fact that we were deeply, deeply oppressed by mass incarceration. And while we all had different language for it, we all spoke in oppression. So from this project, we were able to build out a framework to really name what it was that we were experiencing as justice-impacted people that collectively housed formerly incarcerated people, returning citizens, all of this. So this project and the possibilities allowed us to really activate academia – because one thing about justice-impacted people, there are a lot of brilliant scholars that contribute to our work, but not a lot of justice-impacted scholars that contribute to our work. So being able to take people’s stories, their triumphs, their opportunities for growth, and to be able to turn that into something that we could share with the nation; this all came from unlikely heroes.” 

The evening was a moving introduction to the power of the Movements Against Mass Incarceration archive, bringing people together from various places and backgrounds to orient towards the collective knowledge of justice impacted movement leaders.

The Movements Against Mass Incarceration Oral History archive is now available to explore. 

“I am a staunch believer that art is crucial in the movement to change things and the narratives around the death penalty … That’s why my interviews around the “Death Penalty Project: From the Inside Out” are aimed at how we end the death penalty in the United States and not keep pushing it to the side. So art is part of my expression, my advocacy work, and I learned that there’s few things more powerful than a moving expression of art.””