Tamanika Ferguson
Connect with Tamanika
About Tamanika
Dr. Ferguson is a Black feminist–womanist scholar, educator, and strategist committed to advancing gender justice, racial equity, and prison abolition through research, public scholarship, and community collaboration. Her interdisciplinary work spans social- justice advocacy, communication studies, feminist criminology and sociology, and carceral studies. Dr. Ferguson is the author of the forthcoming book Voices from the Inside: Incarcerated Women Speak (UC Press, 2026), and her peer-reviewed work has appeared in Feminist Formations and is forthcoming in Feminist Criminology. She is also a public intellectual whose commentary and op-eds have been featured in Truthout.
Contributions
Reimagining Prison Reform from the Inside
In the News
Publications
Drawing on 25 years of The Fire Inside newsletter and in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women, shows how women inside California’s prisons use writing as a form of abolition-feminist analysis, agenda-setting, and movement building. Reframes these first-person accounts as theory-bearing knowledge that challenges gender-responsive prison reforms and offers a blueprint for shifting power from carceral institutions to directly impacted communities.
Centers inside-outside authored writing and coalition work to show how incarcerated women and advocates organize for decarceration, dignified care, and community-based safety—and offers a power-shift test for “reform.”
Documents the testimony given by Charisse Shumate, a co-founder of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), and other incarcerated women at a Senate hearing in 2000 regarding medical and living conditions in California prisons. Addresses the invisibility of incarcerated women in dominant discourses of prisons and imprisonment, and their marginalization within the broader anti-carceral movement.