Amed Galo Lopez
Biography
Galo focuses on prisons and inmate experiences in twentieth-century Kenya, with case studies in Latin America, the United States, and other countries in Africa.
The majority of his research explores the role of “Freedom Papers,” a term he defines as the inmate’s form of writing and expression that unlocks their spatial entitlement of communication, awareness, and individuality within the prison system. He will be working with autobiographies, poetry, music, art, archives (some of which were once prisons), social justice organizations, and grassroots as well as firsthand oral accounts through narratives, interviews, tradition, and ritual from revolutionaries, dissidents, anarchists, poets, novelists, social justice activists, feminists, and LGBT+ communities.
Publications
- Lopez, Amed Galo. “Prisons and Freedom Papers: The Kenyan Experience of the Twentieth Century.” Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles, 2021.
Awards & Grants
- James Zidell and Joanne Jubelier Foundation Graduate Fellowship (2023)
- Graduate Student Research Mentorship Fellowship (2023)
Conference Presentations
- “Experiences and Activism Through Writing Among Incarcerated LGBTQ+
Women in Kenya.” UCLA International Institute. 8th Going Global Student
Conference: Promoting Global Understanding.
Virtual, May 28, 2021. - “Refashioning Practices of Care Among Suppressed and Marginalized Women:
A Qualitative Transnational Engagement.” (With Brianna Simmons, Laurelyn
Mynhier, and Sephrine Achesah). UCLA Center for the Study of Women. 31st
Annual Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference. Virtual, April 28, 2021.
