About the Lab

The Comunidades Confined Lab at Wake Forest University is a center for research, education, engagement, and advocacy with and for communities experiencing surveillance, criminalization, and state violence co-founded by Dr. Brittany Battle and Dr. Andrea Gómez Cervantes. Following Gloria Anzaldua’s theorization of the borderlands as the space where systems of power collide to shape relationships, identities, and life trajectories, we use Spanish and English in the lab’s name to reflect the duality and transnationality of the project. Comunidades translates to communities in English, making the name Confined Communities in English. The Comunidades Confined Study is the lab’s principal project examining community supervision programs in the criminal legal and immigration systems.

The Comunidades Confined Lab (CCL) is focused on community-engaged research aimed at transformative change conducted in partnership with those most impacted by the harms of confinement and those with the institutional power to work towards eliminating these harms. We define confinement broadly—both as the act of keeping people inside/within a space, whether it be a formal institution (like a prison or detention center), a specific location (like a home or state through GPS monitoring), or a particular perspective (like a reformist mentally that seeks to salvage harmful practices in service of the state), as well as keeping people outside/without a space, whether it be a country (like deportation in the immigration system), an institution (like expulsion in the school system), a home (like by eviction proceedings), or access to resources and opportunities (like the results of racial capitalist policies and practices). The diverse projects under the CCL bring together community members, organizations, activists, lawyers, scholars, and students to rigorously study and advocate against not only the consequences of the violence of confinement but also the structural logics (re)producing this violence. 

Current Projects

  • Given the growing interest across academic, political, and community discourse to end mass incarceration and immigrant detention, community supervision programs (i.e., probation, parole, and pretrial electronic monitoring in the criminal legal system and alternative-to-detention programs [ATDs] in the immigration system) have often been offered as a “more humane” alternative. However, these programs can result in heightened surveillance and criminalization in an effort to compel compliance with the obligations of supervision, although existing studies do not provide evidence that these attempts to force compliance are actually effective. Instead, these programs have significant consequences for individuals navigating these systems impacting their everyday lives, family relationships, and community participation, essentially resulting in them living lives of incarceration beyond institutions. Like trends in the broader criminal legal system, low-income, Black and Latinx folks are most vulnerable to the consequences of community supervision programs. 

    As the focal project of the Comunidades Confined Lab, this study explores the institutional processes and (collateral) consequences of community supervision programs in both the immigration and criminal legal systems in North Carolina and surrounding states by investigating three key questions using a multi-method approach, including courtroom observations, interviews, photovoice narratives, and surveys. First, how do the state and state actors conceptualize compliance and employ discretion and authority to enforce compliance? Second, how do supervised individuals and their families experience and perform compliance? Third, how do mechanisms of compliance contribute to racial formation?

    The project is grounded in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology that brings impacted individuals onto the research team to participate in all study dimensions to ensure that those most affected by the social issue are guiding the project and requires the incorporation of action components to address the social issue under study. The project aims to contribute to transformative change around the harmful consequences of community supervision for the most vulnerable communities.

  • The Pathways to Abolition Study, conducted by Dr. Brittany Battle, examines the experiences and perspectives of organizers/activists who participated in the Summer 2020 Uprising. Brittany and collaborators interviewed approximately 60 folks across the US to gain insight about how they came to abolitionist social movement spaces, how they experienced state and interpersonal violence, how they understood important concepts like safety and justice, and how they reconciled their abolitionist commitments with their own and their communities’ everyday needs. Findings from the project have been presented in a variety of forums and published in Gender & Society and Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology.

  • The Policing Parenthood Study, conducted as Dr. Brittany Battle’s dissertation work, examines the child support enforcement (CSE) system as an arm of the criminal legal system. The project was an 18-month ethnography of the CSE system conducted between January 2015 and November 2016, one of few projects that incorporate courtroom observations to study the child support system. In addition to the observations of five Juvenile and Domestic Relations courts and other relevant sites of CSE, Brittany interviewed CSE personnel (judges, attorneys, caseworkers, etc.) and custodial and noncustodial parents navigating the system. She also analyzed texts related to the system, such as child support enforcement advertisements and informational materials, legislation, and political rhetoric. Findings from this project have been published in Journal of Marriage and Family, Symbolic Interaction (2018 and 2019), and Contexts. A book manuscript from the project is under contract with New York University Press.

  • Working with community partners and in collaboration with the WFU Medical School, this study examines the mental health and resources to treat mental health among women farmworkers and women farmers in North Carolina. Little research has examined the mental wellbeing of women in agriculture, including both women farmers and farmworkers simultaneously. Despite the significant economic contribution of agriculture to the state, and the important roles and growing numbers of women farmers and farmworkers, little research exists regarding the mental health challenges faced by women in these roles. Findings will be used to generate a community-led intervention to bring mental health resources to women who work in agriculture.