Carceral Politics in Palestine and Beyond: Gender, Vulnerability, Prison

On Thursday, April 5 at 6PM the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University will host the event “Carceral Politics In Palestine and Beyond: Gender, Vulnerability, Prison,” featuring panelists Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Mai Masri, and Lena Meari. This topic has recently been put under the international spotlight by Palestinian detainees who have gone on hunger strike in order to expose the brutality of Israel`s prison-detention complex, an important arm of its criminal military and civilian occupation of Palestine.

At Jadaliyya we believe that events that highlight such important and critical topics should be available to as wide an audience as possible. We hope that people will watch and comment on the remarks and arguments made by the panelists. We also hope that those that haven`t already will take the oppurtunity to check out the Center for Palestine Studies, the first such academic center in a US university.

In order to accommodate anyone who would like to attend the panel but is not in New York City or in the United States, the Center for Palestine Studies will be live streaming the event on their website. The video will also be available afterwards.

Carceral Politics In Palestine And Beyond: Gender, Vulnerability, Prison

Detention and mass incarceration are political tools for managing populations and disciplining individuals. This panel explores the politics of systematic imprisonment and detention in Israel/Palestine, focusing on gendered experiences and thinking comparatively about prison-systems, bodies, and injustice elsewhere, including the U.S. The panelists will explore comparative approaches to Israeli prisons and detention.

PANELISTS: 

JUDITH BUTLER, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
ANGELA DAVIS, Prison Activist and History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
MAI MASRI, Independent Documentary Filmmaker, Beirut, Lebanon
LENA MEARI, Center for Palestine Studies Fellow, Columbia University