Today’s conversation is with Joanna Cardenas, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the nexus of critical carceral studies, disability studies, and Black feminist thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, gender, and space. Through a close spatial analysis of California prisons, her research focuses on how systems of confinement inform understandings of gender, race, and ableism. She also studies how the carceral state of South Central Los Angeles impacts Black and Latinx women, with a focus on surveillance and other policing practices. With a deep engagement in community-based research, she also helps interrogate the experimentation of new surveillance and policing technologies in Skid Row, the Figueroa corridor, and Los Angeles more broadly. Joanna’s research has been supported by the Greater Good Science Center, the Black Studies Collaboratory, the Center for Race and Gender, Berkeley Law, and Berkeley’s Haas Scholars Program. Beyond academia, Joanna is also actively involved in litigation challenging staff misconduct across California state prisons. In this conversation, we discuss the place of carceral studies in the study of Black life, how urban studies and questions of gender impact Black Studies inquiry, and how community work expands the classroom and intellectual life.