Global Carceral States

This research cluster focuses on carceralism—that is, forms of un-freedom and repression—in its various dimensions. Some of the most high-profile global events in recent years are either manifestations of anti-carceral politics or implicate carceral projects by states. We will develop a research agenda that critically and comparatively analyzes carceralism through a global lens. Rather than following the conventional approach of tracing carceral regimes from the Global North to the Global South, thereby maintaining the centrality of the former in understandings of carcerality, we insist on attending to the multidirectional flows that constitute carceral systems in ways that are truly and inherently global and transnational. Our plan is to engage in research to investigate and discern manifestations of global carceral states and to engage and mentor students to design and conduct their own research on prisons, detention camps, police forces, surveillance technologies, and for-profit agencies that actively participate in policing and imprisonment, to name a few.

The four overarching sets of issues are (a) the ways and reasons states and other types of authorities confine people (and categories of people) deemed to be dangerous, hostile, or superfluous in prisons, detention facilities, encampments, or enwalled lands; (b) the strategies and technologies developed and used to manage and treat people within carceral settings (e.g., isolation, torture, police brutality, surveillance, abandonment); (c) the multiple ways in which carceralized populations resist these repressive conditions individually and collectively (e.g., hunger strikes, clandestine organizing, boycotts, demonstrations) or devise strategies of survival and empowerment (e.g., prison writing and art-making, self-education, collective care); and (d) the formation of communities of solidarity and social movements that seek to confront carceral regimes and alter carceral landscapes (e.g., prison abolition, police defunding, decolonization, disability justice, and bodily autonomy movements, anti-racism and anti-apartheid activism). By integrating these four sets of issues, our aim is to investigate carcerality through multiple scales and perspectives, and to compare carcerality in different settings around the world.