Freedom Inside?: Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State

Drawing on interviews and fieldwork at yoga/meditation classes in prisons, Farah Godrej reveals the ways in which incarcerated practitioners have used yoga and meditation to resist the dehumanizing effects of prisons, and to heighten their awareness of institutional racism and mass incarceration among poor people and people of color. Godrej examines both the promises and pitfalls of yoga and meditation, arguing that while these practices could unwittingly exacerbate systemic forms of inequity and injustice, they also serve as resources for challenging and resisting such injustice, whether internally (via the realm of belief) or externally (through action). A combination of ethnography and political theory, Freedom Inside? reimagines the concept of "resistance" in a way that considers people's interior lives as a crucial arena for liberation.