Talk:Jackie Wang

Detail regarding brother's conviction: keep or delete?
The subject's major work, Carceral Capitalism, discusses her brother Randy's case at length, together with his sentence, and the autobiographical importance of the case for the subject. In a recent edit treating Carceral Capitalism in general, I also added detail concerning the brother's conviction (second degree murder, among other lesser charges), anticipating in my edit comment that this detail might be contentious. While acknowledging the rest of the edit, the article's initiator FretfulPorcupine has indicated inclination to delete the details regarding the brother's conviction. Here, I will argue in some detail that the information should be kept, along the lines suggested in my edit comment, while welcoming back-and-forth.

The inclusion of any information about a living person, especially topics such as this one (a family member's criminal record) must pass several high bars, both to protect Wikipedia from libel exposure, and also to carry out the encyclopedia's main goal of providing a basic encyclopedic info resource for the public. I believe that all of these criteria have been met.

-Any such information must be sourced to a high-quality, reputable reference (i.e. not tabloids, unreliable sources, etc). In this case, a web page for an article from the Tampa Bay Times, a major American newspaper, is the main source, buttressed by matching information in Carceral Capitalism. IMO a major American newspaper is about as mainstream as it gets, which together with the subject's book meets the higher criteria to use high-quality sources for articles about living people, and also the general prohibition against original research.

-If these fundamentals are sound, the next, and really central piece in this case, is: is the information germane to an encyclopedia article? "But it's true!" isn't good enough to include information in an article, and this is where pure editorial judgment starts to take over. I believe that the detail regarding the brother's conviction is germane to the article, because the fact of his conviction is discussed at length in the subject's major work, is closely related to the subject's research interests, and is alluded to in book review articles and interviews with the subject (I picked one to cite, there are others). The one detail which is elided in these sources is what the conviction itself was/what the crime was, and we have that per the newspaper article, which lines up with the book's info. Wang's book and the mentions in the review articles effectively open the door to a reasonable question: what was the conviction? And we have that per a reputable source. If a notable person never brings up a personal detail that they don't want discussed and there's no source on same, then it's right out per the above, but what we have here is effectively the opposite. In the article's present state, the fact of the brother's incarceration (not the conviction) is also mentioned in the personal life section.

Put another way, it might be inferred that the subject and her sympathetic reviewers/interviewers have a certain political view against answering the question, but we are not bound to follow a particular point of view/bias just because it is the one held by the article's subject. We are bound to write useful, well-sourced articles. Rather, what we want to try to do is to balance coverage when possible. This is why I've tried to balance the three sources with "just the facts" language in the relevant area, contrasting the three views (Wang, reviewer, newspaper article). MinnesotanUser (talk) 21:59, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello, I think the summary of Jackie Wang's "Against Innocence Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety" is very well done. I belie one area that could be bolstered of the summary is highlighting Wang's discussion on sexual violence in relation to "proper subjects of empathetic identification". Wang explains how using innocence to select such subjects simultaneously regulates the ability for individuals to react to sexual assault and rape. Specifically, "promiscuous" women, sex workers, and women of colour are not seen as legitimate victims of rape as their moral character is continuously questioned. For example, in California in the 1980s and 1990s, Wang writes that police officers would close the files of sex workers, gang members, and drug addicts who alleged rape, by stamping the file with the mention "NHI: No Human Involved". These individuals were deemed "unrapeable". Overall this summary of Wang's piece is excellent, but the sexual dimension discussed by the author could be further explained. 2023justice (talk) 15:34, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Political Science Research Methods POLS 2399
— Assignment last updated by LostCause17 (talk) 15:58, 1 April 2024 (UTC)