Sam Maull

Sam Maull is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology. Sam's research focuses on family, race, and responsibility in the era of mass incarceration and the role that incarceration plays in the anti-black structure of American society. He conducted 3 years of ethnographic field work with incarcerated people and their families in the Bay Area.

Dissertation: Fault Lines: Family, Race, and Responsibility in a San Francisco Jail

Sam’s dissertation work emerges out of the years that he spent conducting field work with incarcerated people and their families in and around the Bay Area and particularly one San Francisco County Jail. Starting with the insight that incarceration never only affects the person incarcerated, this project explores the role of incarceration in reproducing the material conditions and, perhaps more profoundly, the moral conditions of anti-blackness that permeate American society today.