Media Is a Tactic

Can evidence serve communities—and not only the courts? In this live recording from the “Carceral Media Ecologies—And How To Break Them” symposium at UC, Santa Cruz (May 13, 2026), host Pooja Rangan is joined by media artist Sharon Daniel and community organizer Raj Jayadev for a conversation about the tactical uses of media within the criminal legal system. Sharon Daniel reflects on more than two decades of work creating interactive documentary projects with incarcerated people, beginning with Public Secrets, an ambitious archive of testimonies from women incarcerated in California prisons. She discusses how her ongoing investigation into the wrongful conviction of Tim Young led to her work co-teaching the Making an Exoneree course at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Raj Jayadev describes the participatory defense movement pioneered by Silicon Valley Debug, a collective process through which families and communities intervene directly in legal proceedings by generating what Debug calls “social biographies.” The panelists discuss the tension between producing evidence and building social capacity, and what happens when courts are invaded by community intelligence. Citations Silicon Valley Debug California Coalition for Women Prisoners Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) Media Resources Public Secrets (Sharon Daniel, 2007) Reasonable Doubts (Sharon Daniel, 2023) Making an Exoneree (Georgetown University) Raj Jayadev, Protect Your People: How Ordinary Families Are Using Participatory Defense to Challenge Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2023) Unmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. Additional support comes from Amherst College. Full transcripts for all episodes are available at https://ias.ucsc.edu/unmaking-the-prison-image/. Theme music for Visualizing Abolition is Pray by Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science. Our cover art features an image from Christopher Harris’s still/here.