Viviane Saleh-Hanna

Assistant Professor

Phone: 508.910.6453
Fax: 508.999.8808
Office: Liberal Arts Building (LARTS), Room 399K
vhanna@umassd.edu

Dr. Saleh-Hanna is an activist scholar who has worked with prisoners of the criminal justice system internationally. Prior to moving to the United States, she lived in Nigeria and worked with prisoners in Nigeria, Ghana and the Gambia. Her book Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria is the first publication on prisons in West Africa. More recently, her scholarly work has focused on the role music plays in black liberation struggles and the fight against mass incarceration.

Interests

Criminological Theories; Law and Society; Crime Control as Social Control; Black Musicianship and survival through the War on Blackness; the interrelationships between European institutions of Slavery and contemporary Mass Incarceration in the United States; the relationships between historic European colonialism and contemporary African exploitation through penal and economic systems of control.

Education

View Dr. Saleh-Hanna's educational achievements (PDF).

Personal Statement

At the root of all my scholarly interests is the desire and expressed responsibility to bring forth the voices of those rendered voiceless.  For this reason, I have worked with prisoners for more than a decade, and through that work have created avenues through which their experiences and their knowledge can be accessed on this side of the prison walls. 

More recently, I have begun to rely on Black music and the voices of black artists in order to challenge dominant criminological assumptions on and conclusions about crime and justice.  This path was inspired by the artists who have sacrificed their lives for black liberation.  Much like scholarly work is expressed in scholarship, I have come to identify the knowledges emerging in music as musicianship (a term I learned from Fela Kuti’s lyrical genius).  Studying black lyrics emerging from the geographical locations of the European cross-Atlantic slave route (starting in West Africa and ending in the Caribbean and the United States), I learned about history and resistance through the music.  I learned about globalization and colonialism through Fela Kuti's Afrobeat lyrics in Nigeria.  I have been schooled on Rasta societies and the history of self-defense, rebellion and resistance through Peter Tosh’s, Bob Marley’s and Judy Mowatt’s (and many more) lyrics from Jamaica.  I have been taught in detail about the relationships between corporate-controlled hip hop and the criminalization of black communities in the United States through the wise and well researched lyrics of the Welfare Poets, the coup and dead prez (and multitudes of talented artists) in Hip Hop. 

Black Musicianship challenges white supremacy and modern day slavery.  In the lyrics there is an expressed resistance to racist criminalization and a detailed reconstruction of history.  In the spirit of my expressed responsibility to bring forth the voices of those who are not always heard, I continue to use black musicianship in the classroom, continue to reference black musicianship in all new publications, and continue to bring black musicianship to all academic conferences I attend.  While early in my scholarly career I worked to bring the voices of prisoners into the academy and into the community, more recently I have started to bring the voices of the community (the voices of black artists who are based within struggling communities) into the academy with the explicit intention to destabilize and delegitimize racist and oppressive scholarship on crime and justice. 

Publications

Over the last few years, Dr. Saleh-Hanna has edited two volumes for the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP). The 2005 (volume 14, No. 1) publication was the first JPP edition that focused on life inside African prisons as it was described through the daily experiences and struggles of Nigerian prisoners. The second in 2007 (volume 15/16 No. 1 & 2) was co-edited with Ashanti Omowali Alston and was the 15th special anniversary issue for the journal. This volume also marked the 40th anniversary for the forming of the Black Panther Party. Former members of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (men and women who have been in prison for 30 - 40 years) wrote about their black liberation struggles in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. They also commented on the conditions of prisons in this country and their unwavering belief in freedom and black self-determination.

Journals

Saleh-Hanna, Viviane (2001) "Book Review - Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe by van Swaaningen" International Criminal Justice Review 11:145-146.

Book Chapters

Saleh-Hanna, Viviane (2000) "Taking too much for Granted: Studying the Movement and Re-Assessing the Terms" In Ruth Morris and W. Gord West (eds.), The Case for Penal Abolition. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press Inc.

Finateri, Lisa and Saleh-Hanna, Viviane (2000) "International Conference on Penal Abolition: The Birth of ICOPA" In Ruth Morris and W. Gord West (eds.), The Case for Penal Abolition. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press Inc.

Upcoming Book

Saleh-Hanna, Viviane (2008) Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Editorial Boards

Dr. Saleh-Hanna currently serves on two peer-reviewed journals' editorial boards:

1. Journal of Prisoners on Prisons
   This is the only academic journal dedicated to publishing and disseminating the voices of prisoners. For more information on this journal, please visit: http://www.jpp.org/
2. African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies
   This is the only journal in the fields of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Justice Studies that is dedicated to representing African and black scholarship on crime and justice. For more information on this journal, please visit: http://www.umes.edu/ajcjs/

Conferences

The following are conferences she is involved in organizing and strongly endorse. They both represent efforts to integrate academic scholarship and activist, community centered work.

International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA)
For more information on ICOPA go to: http://www.justiceaction.org.au
For more information on ICOPA XII (London, England July, 2008) go to: http://www.justiceaction.org.au/index.php

Critical Resistance Tenth Anniversary Conference (CR10)
For more information on Critical Resistance go to: http://www.criticalresistance.org/
For more information on CR10 (Oakland, California September 2008) go to: http://www.criticalresistance.org/article.php