Tamanika Ferguson

Visiting research scholar in Women’s and Gender Studies

Tamanika Ferguson is a visiting research scholar in Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Dr. Ferguson approaches her work as a black feminist-womanist scholar working at the intersections of feminist and intersectional sociology and criminology, critical race theory, carceral violence, political resistance, social activism, and ethnographic methods and methodology. Her body of research draws on ethnographic methods to investigate the lived experiences of incarcerated women, particularly black and poor and marginalized women of color and their politics and practices of collective and confrontational resistance and actions to predatory state and institutional violence. Dr. Ferguson’s forthcoming book, Voices from the Inside: Incarcerated Women Speak, which conceptualizes and theorizes the incarcerated women’s public sphere and foregrounds the advocacy work of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCW), is slated for publication in January 2026 under the critical carceral studies titles at UC Press.