Carceral Education as Social Innovation: Stephanie Fanfan's Research
A PhD student at Learning Planet Institute examines how education within prisons shapes justice capital and institutional recognition — testing whether carceral systems can transform or merely replicate inequality.
Stephanie Fanfan, a second-year doctoral researcher at Université Lumière Lyon 2’s FIRE Doctoral School, is investigating a question that sits at the intersection of social innovation and governance: how education functions within carceral systems. Her work examines the distribution of what she terms “justice capital” — the institutional recognition and social resources that shape life trajectories within and beyond prison walls.
The research, housed within both the Centre Max Weber and Learning Planet Institute’s Research Unit on Learning Transitions, treats carceral education not as a technical fix but as a site of governance experimentation. It asks whether educational programs can meaningfully redistribute power and recognition, or whether they reproduce the hierarchies they claim to address — a question relevant to any institution that positions learning as transformative.
Fanfan’s positioning as an Afro-Caribbean scholar brings particular salience to this inquiry. The research emerges from Learning Planet Institute’s broader investigation into how learning systems intersect with social innovation policy, recognizing that governance innovations must be tested in the spaces where inequality is most concentrated, not just debated in seminar rooms.