Our Incarcerated Research Fellowship

We develop the capacity of imprisoned people to engage in social movement research, data collection and analysis around issues of importance to them.

Apply

We are no longer accepting Applications.

We are currently reviewing applications and will announce the first cohort for our Incarcerated Research Fellowship in July.

  • The Incarcerated Research Fellowship is a one year paid fellowship designed to train incarcerated people on participatory research methodology and application. The fellowship provides imprisoned people with the funding, training, mentorship, and resources needed to deepen their knowledge of participatory research methods, abolitionist theory, and the criminal legal system so they can contribute to movement scholarship. The first 6 months of the fellowship will revolve around our research curriculum while the second 6 months will be more hands-on as fellows design and execute their own research project on an issue related to parole.

  • We are accepting applications from March through May 2026. The fellowship kicks off in August 2026.

About the fellowship

Imprisoned people are experts about their own experiences.

This fellowship is designed to provide imprisoned people with the funding, training, mentorship, and resources needed to deepen their knowledge of participatory research methods, abolitionist theory, and the criminal legal system so they can contribute to movement scholarship. Why is this important? Unlike other approaches to research that rely heavily on institutional statistics or are developed exclusively by people who are not incarcerated, our participatory approach supports incarcerated people in developing research and analysis about their own political conditions. 

We designed this fellowship to provide the training and resources needed for imprisoned people to produce their own research about the issues of importance to them and identify the solutions to these problems. Early on, we recognized there is a tendency by advocacy organizations to dictate which policies should or should not be changed with often limited or no input from currently incarcerated people. These interventions marshal considerable resources and have a lot of influence over the public discourse on criminalization and incarceration — so what they do matters. Our hope is that through The Work and Us, imprisoned researchers can shift focus in the advocacy and organizing space toward the problems that are of most significant consequence to people inside.