In this talk, experiential educator and writer Luke Hein will draw from his time teaching a general interest class about China in three Alabama State correctional facilities to illuminate hidden connections between distant places and to argue that U.S. prisons represent an underserved but fertile site for China Studies.

Bio: 

Luke Hein is an experiential educator and writer. He has been involved in China Studies since 2005 when he spent his senior year of high school in Beijing. In 2007, he worked for a Chinese tour company in Yunnan, and in 2008 he conducted six months of field research on the effects of the Olympic Games on migrant worker income strategies as part of a year-long undergraduate research project. In 2011 he graduated from Auburn University with a BA in English and a minor in Asian Studies. Luke has worked as a career educator since 2014, mainly with U.S. high school students studying in China and Indonesia. From 2021 to 2024 Luke worked with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project as an administrative assistant and educator. His essay on this experience appears in the Made in China Journal, and Luke plans to continue working with these ideas as a graduate student starting in 2025.