Under what conditions are we free to think? To open ourselves to relating across boundaries of class, color, and experience? To fully give of ourselves to others? And to fully realize our own potential? This weekend will focus on these and other core questions of being.

The system of incarceration in the United States, as with most carceral systems around the world, is designed both to create and to isolate a criminal class into whom disavowed aspects of the free population can be projected. Surrounded by high walls that are both physical and psychological, places of incarceration are largely hidden from view and constitute a closed society that for most of us—at least those of us who are white and privileged—is fantacized, demonized, even romanticized—but never experienced. It is a racialized world flattened into stereotyped darkness so that the world outside can feel brighter.

The truth is of course far more complex. People who have lived within this system—know things about living that the rest of us do not. For some, the caged world of incarceration further deadens the mind and spirit that for many have been under attack by our society since early childhood. For others, the pressures of this life open unexpected, sometimes breathtaking vistas into human experience that transform their view of the world and their sense of purpose within it.

What can we can learn from each other when the walls of incarceration come down? How may have members of our society who have experienced incarceration opened their minds and spirits, even while under the severe constraints of confinement? And how may have other members of our society, who have not experienced incarceration, nonetheless subjected themselves to severe constraints on thinking and being even under the privileges of freedom?

This weekend will be an opportunity to explore these and other paradoxical relationships between freedom and constraint in the body, mind, and spirit.