“It Feels Like Freedom”: Philosophy and Literature Behind Bars
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Dr. Judith Norman describes a transformative program pairing university students with incarcerated scholars to study philosophy and literature together in Texas prisons. Through shared learning circles focused on texts like Plato and Mary Oliver's poetry, the program builds respect and community while challenging participants' assumptions about human potential and redemption.
Key takeaways
- Philosophy and literature education in prisons creates transformative communities built on mutual respect, where incarcerated people move from being defined by their worst actions to being recognized as full human beings and co-creators of knowledge.
- Language matters profoundly: using terms like 'people currently incarcerated' instead of 'inmate' or 'convict' honors human dignity and enables growth rather than trapping individuals in their past mistakes.
- The program demonstrates that humanities education is not a luxury but essential to human flourishing, particularly for those whose humanity has been systematically denied by incarceration.
- Incarcerated scholars bring genuine expertise and wisdom to learning circles; the relationship is reciprocal, with university students and instructors transformed as much as the scholars by recognizing brilliance behind bars.
- Creating safe learning spaces requires intentional work on oneself to overcome prejudice and punitive frameworks, and sitting in circles of equals rather than hierarchical classrooms fundamentally changes how knowledge gets created.
About Dr. Judith NormanDr. Judith Norman is a distinguished professor and chair of the philosophy department at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She co-directs the Philosophy and Literature Circle program, which brings university students into prisons to create transformative learning communities with incarcerated scholars.
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MEETING FOR THE WEEK OF May 5, 2025
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Program: “It Feels Like Freedom”: Philosophy and Literature Behind Bars
Speaker: Dr. Judith Norman
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Program: “It Feels Like Freedom”: Philosophy and Literature Behind Bars
Speaker: Dr. Judith Norman
We bring you a new program every week on innovation, entrepreneurship, and education and how they contribute to service to others.
The Philosophy and Literature Circle provides learning opportunities for scholars incarcerated in prisons and jails in South-Central Texas to engage with and create works of literature and philosophy. The program draws on the strengths of humanistic inquiry and engagement to redress the isolation and exclusion central to U.S. punishment cultures. The mission of the Circle is to cultivate collaborative learning communities so that people in prison and beyond can thrive and build trust across divides. The vision of the Circle is to foster a world filled with thriving communities of trust and accountability that embody commitments to justice, peace, and freedom. Program content and structure seek to bring such a world about through critical, compassionate, and creative engagement with texts, ourselves, one another, and our worlds.
Our speaker, Judith Norman, has been engaged with community organizing for 20 years. She has worked with movements for economic justice, anti-militarization, educational justice, and the liberation of Palestine as a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2020 she helped start the Philosophy and Literature Circle at the Torres Unit, a learning circle that brings undergraduate students together with incarcerated scholars to read, write, and discuss works of philosophy and literature.
Judith is a Murchison Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Trinity University. Her research focuses on the history of philosophy, and German philosophy in particular, and she has published numerous articles on the subject. She has translated the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and teaches classes in the history of philosophy as well as indigenous philosophy and the philosophy of art.
Members and guests, please welcome Judith Norman!
To learn more, go to:
To make a donation to the Classroom on the Inside program (UTSA):
https://giving.utsa.edu/thecircle
To learn more, go to:
https://www.trinity.edu/news/classroom-inside
To read Mary Oliver's Wild Geese:
https://www.empoweredstl.org/courageinactionblog/k8yuhtr76c6s58w3368kamhw0mxit2
The Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network and the words we use:
https://ficgn.org/our-pledge
To learn more about the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley, go to:
http://rotary.cool
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