Vitalis Im, Ph.D., LMSW

Vitalis Im is an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Human Services at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. 

Dr. Im is a sociocultural anthropologist and social worker whose community-engaged research examines how carcerality organizes social life. His work approaches abolitionist praxis as a psychoanalytic endeavor, asking how encounters with carceral institutions and their afterlives may sustain or collapse the capacity for intersubjective recognition. He is particularly interested in how artmaking practices may facilitate the production of relational thirds, ways of being with others that disrupt the punitive and retributive relational logics of the prison-industrial complex.

As an opera singer and amateur improviser, Dr. Im’s research is informed by seven years of facilitating theater, music, and creative writing workshops in Michigan prisons with the Prison Creative Arts Project, as well as three years of curatorial work with the Annual Exhibition of Artists in Michigan Prisons. His public-facing research includes Postmarked from the Inside: An Exhibition of Greeting Cards Made in Michigan Prisons. He is a member of the Strategic Advisory Committee for The Linkage Community, an organization comprised of formerly incarcerated artists and creatives in the state.

Dr. Im’s scholarship and teaching are further informed by his work as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. His clinical experiences include work with male perpetrators of domestic and interpersonal violence, survivors of mass incarceration, and older adults navigating existential anxieties and grief related to death and dying. He maintains a private practice in Ann Arbor, MI.

Dr. Im earned his PhD in Anthropology and Social Work from the University of Michigan. He also holds a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan School of Social Work, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music and Anthropology from Bard College.