Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Anthropology Channel

Episode: Heath Pearson, "Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town" (Duke UP, 2024)
Host: Aliza
Guest: Heath Pearson, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Justice and Peace Studies, Georgetown University
Date: November 18, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode is an in-depth conversation with Heath Pearson about his newest book, Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town. Blending ethnography, personal experience, and political critique, Pearson’s work investigates the everyday realities and contradictions of life in a prison town in South Jersey. The discussion moves from the deeply personal motivations behind the project to the intellectual, emotional, and political challenges of researching and writing about carceral capitalism, the banality and resistance of everyday life, and the radical potential of imagination, community, and love amid systemic oppression.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Genesis of the Project & Title

[02:06 – 14:46]

• Personal Motivation: The project was sparked by a family member’s incarceration, prompting both personal and intellectual engagement with prisons and policing.
  • “When I was on my way to move to New Jersey … a very close family member was incarcerated. And so that obviously sent me on a … personal journey … trying to get good legal representation, things like this.” (02:32 – A)
• Serendipity & Fieldwork: A chance encounter on a New Jersey train led Pearson to Cumberland County, a town with five prisons, which became his field site.
  • “After having one lunch with her and visiting one prison, I just knew that was where I was supposed to stay … I had this gut feeling.” (04:44 – A)
• Naming the Book: The evolution of the title, from “In Search of El Chapo” (a nod to rumors circulating during fieldwork) to the final selection of “Life Beside Bars” was itself an act of “imaginative openness.”
  • “Life beside bars actually is what I’m doing. And it was like both of us just kind of stopped right there.” (13:21 – A)

2. Confinement Beyond the Prison

[14:46 – 26:07]

• The “Excess” of Confinement: Pearson describes how carceral logics and effects exceed the literal prison structure, infusing community life, politics, and histories (see archival work and its impact).
  • “Confinement long exceeds the construction of prisons and prison towns.” (14:46 – C)
• Everyday Life, Banality, and Resilience: Pearson resists dramatic ethnography for a depiction of “the banality of the whole thing”—mundane routines, daily strategies of endurance, and moments of joy or togetherness amid domination.
  • “People find ways to build very beautiful, robust life…We do need to find joy and make joy.” (24:56 – A)
  • Memorable quote: “We still have to get up and brush our kids teeth, and hug our partner before we walk out the door…and build very beautiful, robust life.” (23:46 – A)

3. Ethnography as Political Critique: “The Sheepdog Seminar”

[26:07 – 36:47]

• Controversy & Purpose: Discussion of a central chapter (“The Sheepdog Seminar”) that generated polarized responses. Pearson’s refusal to provide psychological or socioeconomic rationalization for white supremacist violence sets his work apart.
  • “There is no sort of 'Yeah, that was fine.' It’s either they hate that chapter so much … or they love that chapter so much.” (28:23 – A)
• Refusal and Representation: Following Audra Simpson’s work on “refusal,” Pearson keeps subjects’ violent language at the forefront rather than constructing sympathetic narratives.
  • “I’m going to refuse to build the conditions for empathy that the discipline relies on…Instead of trying to move the readers to empathize with these subjects, I’m going to keep these subjects at the level of their language.” (35:35 – A)
• Reception & Shifting Contexts: The impact of political climate on how such ethnography is received (pre- and post-2016).

4. Imagination and Everyday Resistance

[36:47 – 45:31]

• Beyond Grand Resistance: The book observes how people imagine and create spaces for life “beside” domination, outside of grand gestures or obvious political action.
  • “People began to imagine what is it that we can do that will not get our skulls cracked in by the police department here?...The lack of explicit … political organizing … was the extreme imagination of folks to say, actually, we’re doing this over here and that’s creating these other kinds of spaces.” (39:33 – A)
• Imagination as Daily Practice: Small, “hidden moments, hidden corners, hidden spaces” become acts of survival, meaning-making, and hopeful community-building.
  • “Imagination became a kind of cornerstone for building robust social life in a space that is dominated by individuating and isolating human beings.” (43:45 – A)

5. The Book’s Conclusion: An Invitation to Beauty and Building

[45:31 – 55:41]

• Beauty as Resistance: Pearson aims not only for critique but also for the creation and recognition of beauty, joy, and love, as forms of everyday resistance and world-building.
  • “I wanted to write something beautiful … because the spaces I was invited into and the people who invited me … showed me a radical beauty of living that I did not anticipate.” (46:34 – A)
• Invitation, Not Prescription: The conclusion extends a call for readers not just to critique but also “to build”—to seek and make spaces of care, connection, and freedom, whether in classrooms, community projects, or fleeting conversations.
  • “I hope that people will be encouraged to build rather than just enraged to tear things down.” (48:34 – A)
  • “I want more love in the world. That’s my hope.” (54:15 – A)

6. What’s Next?

[55:41 – 61:46]

• Current Work: Pearson is shifting to research on the intersection of Hollywood, the military-industrial complex, and the construction of carceral logics through “action movies” and television, exploring their role as “key architects of the carceral state.”
  • “The project is kind of tentatively titled Streaming Man right now, which is both an idea of like humans have become streaming animals, but also we learn what it means to be man from stream.” (58:41 – A)
• Personal Priorities: He is also engaged in local housing activism and cherishing time with his children.
  • “Working on being with my two kids, spending time with them and in the forest.” (61:19 – A)

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On research motivation:

  • “I spent three years down there doing the ethnographic research, doing the archival research…The Everydayness of it, you know, it's like the banality of, of the whole thing. Right?” (05:55 – A)

• On the title’s meaning:

  • “That word beside, somehow captured...the kind of spatial idea of besideness, it really unlocked everything.” (12:41 – A)

• On beauty and hope:

  • “Critique is essential, but critique is not all we have, and it’s not all that allows us to be fully human with one another and on this planet.” (47:34 – A)

• On imagination as survival:

  • “Imagination is ... the significance of imagination for human beings to build something else.” (44:49 – A)

• On the limits of ethnographic empathy:

  • “I’m going to refuse to build the conditions for empathy that the discipline relies on to make its political critique often.” (35:16 – A)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction to Pearson & Project Origins: 02:06 – 14:46
• Archival Method & Confinement’s “Excess”: 14:46 – 26:07
• Political Critique and “The Sheepdog Seminar”: 28:06 – 36:47
• Imagination and Everyday Life: 36:47 – 45:31
• Conclusion: Beauty, Building, Love: 45:31 – 55:41
• Future Projects & Reflections: 55:41 – 61:46

Tone & Style

The conversation is warm, reflective, and deeply personal. It foregrounds the everyday, the mundane, and the emotional complexities of studying and living with carceral reality—balancing critique with a kind of radical, hopeful intimacy.

For Listeners

Heath Pearson’s Life Beside Bars is not just about prisons or policy, but about how people endure, imagine, create, and love “beside bars.” The episode is an invitation to recognize the excess of confinement, the radical ordinariness of resistance, and the ever-present potential to build beauty and community within—and against—the carceral state.