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.
