Critical Prison Studies, Carceral Ethnography, and Human Rights: From Lived Experience to Global Action


On 23 and 24 July 2016, the workshop ‘Critical Prison Studies, Carceral Ethnography, and Human Rights: From Lived Experience to Global Action’ was held at the IISL. Coordinated by a team of Canadian scholars―Gillian Balfour (Trent University), Kelly Hannah-Moffat (University of Toronto), Joane Martel (Université Laval), Debra Parkes (University of Manitoba), Dawn Moore (Carleton University), and Sarah Turnbull (University of Oxford)―the workshop brought together twenty participants from around the world for two days of dialogue and discussion about prison and migrant detention research from critical perspectives. The sessions explored issues of confinement in and across an impressive and diverse range of jurisdictions: Australia, Canada, Denmark, India, Italy, Japan, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The workshop was organised around two main themes: (1) how issues related to human rights are experienced in carceral contexts and how violations are differentially framed in advocacy, law, and administrative practices; and (2) how we can understand and make evident rights violations that are rarely visible due to the closed character of prisons and other sites of confinement. Particular attention was paid to methodological and theoretical concerns, including the role of critical researchers in studying the often hidden worlds of incarceration. The coordinating team were happy that the workshop garnered the attention of local newspaper GARA, which featured two articles related to the event. Overall, the workshop was a great success and marks a fruitful first start to the development of an international, cross-disciplinary network of scholars working in the areas of critical prison and migrant detention studies. The coordinating team look forward to working towards a publication of the workshop proceedings in order to share the excellent work being done by the workshop participants.