Tamanika.jpg

Tamanika Ferguson

Visiting Research Scholar in Women's and Gender Studies, Wellesley College
Chapter Member: Los Angeles Unified SSN
Areas of Expertise:

About Tamanika

Ferguson studies the social and intellectual thought of incarcerated women as cultural and political intervention and as a legitimate knowledge source that can transform structural change in prison and criminal policy reforms. Ferguson is an active member of CCWP and sits on the Fire Inside Newsletter editorial committee. She is also working with a group of amazing public opinion leaders, activists, journalists, and writing coaches at The OpEd Project and Equality Now with the mission to change who writes history and advance the human and civil rights of women and girls, the world over.

Contributions

Reimagining Prison Reform from the Inside

In the News

Opinion: "Building “Feminist Jails” Ignores a Larger Problem," Tamanika Ferguson, Truthout, October 16, 2022.
Opinion: "Abortion Rights Movement Must Include Incarcerated People," Tamanika Ferguson, The Progressive Magazine, July 20, 2022.

Publications

"Lessons in Resistance, Activism, and Solidarity: Incarcerated Women and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners" Feminist Formations 36, no. 2 (2024).

Documents the testimony given by Charisse Shumate, a co-founder of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), and other incarcerated women at a Senate hearing in 2000 regarding medical and living conditions in California prisons. Addresses the invisibility of incarcerated women in dominant discourses of prisons and imprisonment, and their marginalization within the broader anti-carceral movement.

"Voices from the Inside: Incarcerated Women Speak".

Uses a racial, gender, and queer justice framework to effectively address and counter the role of carceral punishment in American society. Addresses more specifically, in California and the role of justice-involved women and their advocates, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, to achieve human justice reforms that improve carceral conditions and liberate more women.