Friday, November 14 at 4:00 pm
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls present
A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestreamvia the Hallwalls website.
Based on ethnographic research of a political campaign to reform criminal justice responses to the violent crime of U.S. military veterans, this talk unpacks how criminal justice policy actors engage, consume, and reshape medical knowledge for political ends. Focusing on political contestation over who specifically should be eligible for lesser sentences and rehabilitative responses, the talk shows that while medicalization solves some legitimacy problems for reformers, it simultaneously generates new knowledge and classification struggles. This underlines the fragility of medicalization processes in criminal justice institutions and raises questions about the consequences of making criminal courts key arbiters of vulnerability and recovery.
Victoria Piehowski uses interpretive qualitative methods to study medicine, punishment, and the politics of knowledge at their intersection. She is the author of the book-in-progress titled, Medicalizing Violence: Trauma, Veterans Treatment Courts, and the Contradictions of Contemporary Justice Reform, which examines political efforts to medicalize and treat the violent crime of U.S. military veterans. Her past research has analyzed sobriety discipline in probation, discourses and practices surrounding domestic violence crime, and caring labor in the context of pretrial bail processes. This work appears in Social Science & Medicine, Law & Social Inquiry, Punishment & Society, and RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.