The seed for The Knotted Line was planted in 2007 while working at a public high school in East Oakland. That year, I had conversations with students about incarcerated family members and watched as disciplinary attempts to 'kick kids out of class,' suspension and expulsion removed students from their school community only to deepen conflict. I began to reflect more deeply on how the prison industrial complex (PIC) was not only responsible for control and surveillance of over 7 million people, but that it has deep historical roots and presence in many institutions, including public education. As a result, I began working with incarcerated men, youth, and their family members, trying to look critically at the prison industrial complex through pedagogical structures that attempted to disembed the PIC's conceptual structure.

During one project, What Cannot Be Taken Away, I drew a recent history of the prison industrial complex on butcher paper and invited participants to add their own stories to the timeline. The exercise connected the often stigmatized and isolated personal stories of incarceration with larger systemic forces and historical context.

When we exhibited the final portraits from that project, my friend Tanya Orellana and I expanded on this initial research, looking at the historical roots of the PIC beginning in 1493. We also added liberatory futures up to 2025—essentially the imagined full implementation of work currently being done. As before, the timeline provided a historical and systemic frame to contextualize individual stories. In looking at the historical roots, we expanded the central organizing theme to the relationship of freedom and confinement.

In the context of "the Land of the Free,” the timeline argued that freedom has always been a central element of the U.S. national narrative. But, most importantly, freedom is only understandable in the context of how it defines and confines those who do not have access to freedom. “Freedom,” in this sense, is reliant on the “other” being entrapped in and targeted by the major carceral mechanisms throughout U.S. history: chattel slavery, manifest destiny, colonization, reservations, immigration, ghettoes, non-citizenship and the prison industrial complex. There is another story, however, that also needed to be included: the thread of liberatory movements that have simultaneously sought to reimagine freedom and struggle for self-determination. The addition of the liberatory histories, the paintings, and the online format formed The Knotted Line, a two-year undertaking with programming and design by Erik Loyer, additional research by Lisa Nowlain and additional concept design by Josh Begley. 

In addition, The Knotted Line has been shaped through collaborations with an amazing group of educators which has led to this curriculum guide. Alykhan Boolani, Fatima Ghatala and Marguerite Sheffer were the first to attempt a four-week project using the website and their conceptual input has shaped much of what followed. Liza Gesuden opened up the possibility of using creative writing and literature through the amazing project with Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Former high school teachers of mine—Augusto Andres, David Tarpinian and David Rice—invited me back to my old high school, which led to the outcomes in the Flipping the Script Project. Professor Victoria Robinson offered the first opportunity for a college-level collaboration at UC Berkeley. Josh Perlman helped form an early middle school integration through the Whose Constitution? workshop while Josh Healey created the Timeline of Resistance in a youth organizing setting. Numerous other workshops, presentation and exhibitions—at the Brecht Forum, Alcatraz Island, the Allied Media Conference, Detroit Future Schools, USC, UCSC, USF, San Francisco Juvenile Hall, with California Coalition of Women Prisoners, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and many more—have produced new insights and adaptations in each instance.  A number of other people gave feedback and insight including Sarah Gonzales and Naomi Gordon-Loebl. In addition, the curriculum draws from numerous existing workshops and toolkits including Hurricane Season, Critical Resistance, the Chicago Anti-PIC collective, Theater of the Oppressed and many others of whom I am likely not even aware. We made a sincere effort to note these connections throughout the guide. Chris Abueg’s design is a visual mirror to the pedagogy at the core of this project while also making it a pleasure to use. Finally, Ora Wise has worked tirelessly on the final curriculum design, bringing flow, adaptability, and incredible insight to the process. 

From the beginning, the Panta Rhea foundation has supported the vision of The Knotted Line. It is their incredibly generous support and dedication to the work which makes this guide possible.

The Knotted Line curriculum offers four major, interconnected concepts for engaging with history as a way of making sense of the present: 

The Knotted Line Curriculum is ready-to-use; it contains project outlines, suggested workshop sequences, variable timeframes, worksheets, videos, slideshows and Common Core standards for high school. In instances of limited access to computers there are PDF versions available of the paintings and slideshows, though inevitably some of the concept is lost in print. If working with devices without Flash, there is a mobile version of the website available at knottedline.com.

With that said, we offer this guide with the hope that you will remix, sample, critique, and grow it. As educators we are constant improvisers but our intention was to prepare a fertile ground from which to begin. The workshops themselves are organized in a suggested sequence that builds on language and concepts introduced in previous workshops, but many of them were developed as and continue to be used on their own. We chose not to offer a one-hour workshop option due to the complicated nature of the material. But, if that is all the time you have, we recommend playing with the website, responding to the questions and treating it as a bit of a scavenger hunt. For a quick introduction, you can view this 3 minute video.

Workshops are organized into a four-part cycle that spans two 55-minute sessions. 

Using this structure adapted from the 4MAT learning cycle, each workshop goes through activities designed to lead participants through the following stages:

The cycle of learning provides a structure in which all learning styles are valued and engaged with. The different stages give learners opportunities to shine where they feel confident and learn from their peers when they feel stretched.

Finally, if you would like to work with this further in any way, we offer exhibitions, trainings, professional development, and consulting work.

Thank you and be in touch—we’d love to hear about highlights, challenges, and the work that gets created with The Knotted Line.

knottedline.com@gmail.com