Vesla Mae Weaver writes about race, power, and political life. Her research pioneers concepts to understand the role of incarceration and policing in race-class subjugated communities, and the development and consequences of coercive institutions in American democracy. Her books include Arresting Citizenship and Creating a New Racial Order. Her next book, The State From Below: Racial Authoritarianism in U.S. Democracy, amasses the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of the police—by those who are policed—to date. She also co-directs the American Prison Writing Archive, the largest and first fully searchable digital archive of essays written inside confinement in four hundred prison and jail facilities, and is the principal investigator of the Prison Witness Collective. Such projects unite a concern with positioning the unfree as central theorists of democracy.