Yoga and meditation programs no doubt offer crucial respite for those who are incarcerated, but what sort of political effects do they have? Do they reinforce the neoliberal logic of mass incarceration which emphasizes individual choices, or can they assist marginalized people in navigating systemic injustice? Drawing on collaborations with incarcerated practitioners, interviews with volunteers and formerly incarcerated practitioners, and her own fieldwork with organizations offering yoga/meditation classes inside prisons, Farah Godrej examines both the promises and pitfalls of yoga and meditation. Freedom Inside? reveals the ways in which incarcerated persons have used yogic practices to resist the dehumanizing effects of prisons, and to heighten their awareness of institutional racism and mass incarceration among poor people and people of color. Godrej argues that while these practices could unwittingly exacerbate systemic forms of inequity and injustice, they also serve as resources for challenging such injustice, whether internally (via the realm of belief) or externally (through action). A combination of ethnography and political theory, Freedom Inside? reimagines the concept of "resistance" in a way that considers people's interior lives as a crucial arena for liberation.

Praise for Freedom Inside?:

"Freedom Inside? is far more than a book about yogic and meditative practices in prison. It is a reflection on the neoliberal seductions of self-help and what self-improvement means in the context of an oppressive total institution. Farah Godrej questions everything, including her role as a researcher, a volunteer, a critic of the carceral state. The result is a deeply meditative, careful, and caring book. By resisting the false dichotomies of self-help versus systemic critique, as well as the "violent/non-violent" distinction, Godrej pushes us past the deadly classifications so endemic to the prison industrial complex." -- Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University, author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America

"In this ambitious book, Farah Godrej asks after the tensions, ambivalences, and potentially transformative political work performed by yoga and meditation in the gut of the racialized carceral state. Combining decades of first-person experience as a practitioner of yoga, direct research inside the California prison system, and the sensibilities of an accomplished political theorist, Freedom Inside? is an original, boundary-crossing work that contributes to critically important questions about the relationship between individual practices of the mind, heart, and body and quiescence to—or revolt against—broader collective structures of domination and suffering." -- Timothy Pachirat, author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight and Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power

"Through the lens of a four-year ethnography as a yoga and meditation instructor in prison, Godrej explores the insidious culture of individual responsibility, the widespread acceptance of responsibilization assumptions by people who volunteer in prison rehabilitation programs, and the limited but real possibilities for institutional reform and individual redemption. These are complex, abstract, and often demoralizing arguments, but Godrej brings them to life with real people, described vividly, engaged compassionately." -- Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine, author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

Available at Oxford University Press, or wherever you like to purchase books

Watch my recent public lectures on the book here:

Listen to podcasts and recent radio interviews on the book:

KPFA 94.1 FM's Against the Grain show in Berkeley, CA at this link

  WORT 89.9 FM's 8 O'Clock Buzz show in Madison, WI at this link (headphones strongely recommended!).

New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science podcast, hosted by Nick Cheesman, featured on the New Books Network (and named Book of the Day for May 18)

Conversation with Toby Miller on the Cultural Studies podcast

Cosmopolitan Political Thought asks the question of what it might mean for the very practices of political theorizing to be cosmopolitan. It suggests that such a vision of political theory is intimately linked to methodological questions about what is commonly called comparative political theory--namely, the turn beyond ideas and modes of inquiry determined by traditional Western scholarship. It is therefore an argument for applying the idea of cosmopolitanism--understood in a particular way--to the discipline of political theory itself.

As Farah Godrej argues, there are four crucial components of this cosmopolitan intervention: the texts under analysis, the methods for interpreting non-Western texts and ideas, the application of these ideas across geographical and cultural boundaries, and the deconstruction of Eurocentrism. In order to be genuinely cosmopolitan, Godrej states, political theorists must reflect on their perspectives inside and outside various traditions and immerse themselves in foreign ideas, languages, histories, and cultures--ultimately relocating themselves within their disciplinary homes. The result will be a serious challenge to accepted solutions to political life.

"Critiques of Eurocentrism have been around in academia for several decades but their impact on political theory has been painfully slow. Worse, an alternative that breaks the stranglehold of hegemonic categories and engages with multiple traditions of thought has barely germinated. Lucid, wide-ranging and well-informed, Farah Godrej's book is a significant contribution to an important and emerging field of enquiry that is destined to transform existing power relations in political theory." --Rajeev Bhargava, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, India

"It seems obvious that political theorizing in a globalized context should not be limited to the preoccupations and normative commitments of Western liberal societies. But what might a more cosmopolitan mode of political theorizing look like? Farah Godrej's fascinating new book shows that it involves a journey of radical self-dislocation and self-relocation that is both difficult and necessary." --Daniel A. Bell, Tsinghua University and Jiaotong University

"There has been a knowledge-explosion in the fields of the political philosophies of India, China and Islam. This has been accompanied by the emergence of a new generation of scholars well versed in the very same fields. These two phenomena pose a problem to the traditional way of teaching of Western political philosophy. Farah Godrej, a leader of the new generation of scholars, makes a bold and timely proposal for the reform of the field of political philosophy. Well documented and well argued, this book is a welcome addition to the literature on how political philosophy should be studied in the twenty-first century." --Anthony Parel, Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary

"Ambitious in its intellectual breadth and depth, and infused with a keen grasp of the politics of our time and what they demand from engaged intellectuals who hope to make a difference in the world, this is a first-rate contribution and a passionate plea for cosmopolitanism.Students and scholars of comparative political theory will find much food for thought in this provocative, rich, and thoughtful volume." --Perspectives on Politics

"By traveling with philosophical ideas and reworking them through encounters with cultural difference, Godrej enriches our thinking about the relationship between political theory and alterity." --Theory & Event

Fred Dallmayr’s work is innovative in its rethinking of some of the central concepts of modern political philosophy, challenging the hegemony of a modern “subjectivity” at the heart of Western liberalism, individualism and rationalism, and articulating alternative voices, claims and ideas. His writings productively confound the logocentrism of Western modernity, while providing alternative conceptions of political community that are post-individualist, post-anthropocentric and relational.