Tamanika Ferguson

Dr. Tamanika Ferguson is the author of “Lessons in Resistance, Activism, and Solidarity: Incarcerated Women and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners” (Feminist formations, 2024) and “In the Belly of the Beast:” Feminist Lessons in the Politics and Practice of Abolition Feminism, Resistance, and Freedom (Feminist Criminology, 2025). Her forthcoming book with University of California Press (2026), Voices from the Inside, draws on ethnographic methods to examine the experiences of incarcerated women and gender-expansive people who organize to shrink carceral power and strengthen community infrastructures of care. Currently, she’s a visiting research scholar in women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College and a member of the Anti-Carceral Co+Laboratory. She earned her PhD at Howard University and approaches her work as an intersectional scholar of critical carceral studies, centering abolition feminism, critical resistance, and the gendered politics of punishment.