Hollis Moore

On leave for the 2022/2023 academic year.

Dr. Hollis Moore researches the sociality of uneven carceral expansion, with a focus on the experiences, relationships, and understandings of people targeted by the criminal law. She is a Sociocultural Anthropologist by training and has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in and around prisons in Northeast Brazil. By amplifying marginalized perspectives and centering the Global South in her research and teaching, she seeks to contribute to the project of challenging carceral common sense and our complicity in upholding transnational carceral logics. Her academic interests include the intersection between political and legal anthropology, urban ethnography, and the study of gender and family life.

She is currently conducting a longitudinal study of the fraught trajectories of young Brazilians who have experienced the incarceration of a parent. This project focuses on the (re)production of marginalization through criminal law, policing, and imprisonment as well as intergenerational processes of care and (de)criminalization. She has known her research participants for a decade, since they were children, and is grateful for the way they have welcomed her into their lives and their homes, generously sharing their insights, struggles, pleasures, and daily routines with her.

Dr. Moore’s work can be found in a number of venues including: Carceral communities: Troubling 21st century prison regimes in Latin America; The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology; and The Cambridge Handbook of Kinship.