Speakers
Description
Although not explicitly aligned with Sport for Development and Peace, yoga programs in prisons and community justice settings—both of which we understand to be “carceral” environments—share similar goals around achieving human development through engagement with physical activity. In this paper, we explore multiple meanings given to yoga by instructors who have taught in these carceral settings, including their philosophical understandings of yoga, pedagogical approaches to teaching incarcerated or justice-involved students, and experiences teaching yoga in carceral spaces. We find that instructors understand yoga to provide unique and holistic mental, physical and spiritual benefits, a belief which is often derived from individual experiences of transformation through yoga. This understanding of yoga drives their passion for working with justice-involved individuals, but also risks replicating a form of “sport evangelism” by overstating the positive impacts of yoga in carceral settings. Nonetheless, instructors offer nuanced understandings of how carceral environments negatively affect their students and how these experiences create both barriers and opportunities for yoga to be practiced in unique ways. We argue that, while their individual experiences and passion lead to a very optimistic view of yoga’s positive impacts, instructors develop nuanced understandings of how justice-involved persons engage with yoga in diverse ways; and how these engagements are contoured both by individual biographies and the daily realities of living in carceral spaces. The distinct characteristics of carceral spaces interact with broader philosophical underpinnings and social meanings of yoga to produce “carceral yoga” as a unique form of physical culture.
