_A Father’s Lullaby

A Father’s Lullaby is a collaborative transmedia project that highlights the role of men in raising children and underlines the absence of fathers due to the racial disparities of mass incarceration and its direct impact on children, women, and lower-income communities. The project is composed of an ongoing series of interactive public installations, community-engaged tool-sharing workshops, and a participatory geolocated website. Intimate interviews, songs, and lullabies offer poetic meditations on the spaces of love and trauma, presence and absence, and the power of personal memories to interrogate the structural violence of mass incarceration.

Co-created with formerly incarcerated fathers, A Father’s Lullaby invites community members to become part of a growing movement by sharing lullabies and stories and giving a voice to the social challenge of mass incarceration. The project is centered on marginalized voices of absent fathers while inviting all men to participate by singing lullabies and sharing memories of childhood. The co-created space of love and of shared memories about childhood becomes a place to contemplate difficult issues our society is facing today.