EVENT - Global Carceral States: Violence, Transgressions, and Technologies of Imprisonment (28–30 May 2021)

EVENT - Global Carceral States: Violence, Transgressions, and Technologies of Imprisonment (28–30 May 2021)

EVENT - Global Carceral States: Violence, Transgressions, and Technologies of Imprisonment (28–30 May 2021)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Global Carceral States: Violence, Transgressions, and Technologies of Imprisonment


Sponsored by 
the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California – Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA, and Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at Birzeit University, Palestine.

(28 – 30 May 2021, to be held online) 


Please use this Zoom link to register for the conference, or visit the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies YouTube page and Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights YouTube page for the live stream.  

Imprisonment has long been a central tactic for managing and confining members of populations deemed to be risky, hostile, or superfluous. Today, we are witnessing the expanding reach of carcerality with effects extending beyond prison walls. Our conference is an invitation to reflect upon this current globalized carceral reality, including imprisonment as a tactic of control, subjugation and dispossession; and on ways in which carcerality might be countered. 

The three-day conference features presentations by scholars and activists to contribute to our collective understanding of themes intrinsic to global experiences of imprisonment, and the ways in which people attempt to counter the violence inflicted upon them in confined and surveilled spaces. The keynote addresses and panels will touch upon ways in which the management and control of imprisoned populations are enacted; on varying modes of violence and torture; on prisons’ intersections with regimes of race, gender and sexuality; on the effects of imprisonment; and on creative responses to, and from, captivity. This engagement with global experiences of imprisonment and violence that are often kept in the dark might bring us closer to imagining a more just world. All presentations will be translated into English, Arabic, and Spanish. 

Day One: Friday, 28 May 2021 


8.30 PDT/ 15.30 GMT/ 18.30 Jerusalem: Introductory Statements
 

9.00 PDT/ 16.00 GMT/ 19.00 Jerusalem - Keynote Address by Mohamedou Ould Salahi

Guantanamo Inside and Out: One Man’s Tale of Violence, Survival, and the Redemptive Power of Writing. 

10.00 PDT/ 17.00 GMT/ 20.00 Jerusalem - Discursive Resistance: Writing Across Bars

  • Claudia Alarcon: Literary Topographies of Subjectivities in Resistance: A Lens into the Destigmatization of Criminality 
  • Doran Larson: Prison Witness, Prison Resistance: Working with the American Prison Writing Archive
  • Widad al-Barghouthi: My Story with Prison Literature
  • Mohsen Abd al-Mohsen: Time as Contradictory Accumulations 

11.30 PDT/ 18.30 GMT/ 21.30 Jerusalem – Global Prison Industrial Complexes 

  • Bruce Stanely: Fortified Urban Carcerality: Assembling a Middle East Carceral Armature
  • Shalaka Thakur and Maitreyee Avachat: UAPA: Dissent, Criminality and Consent in Contemporary India
  • Maya Wind: Colonial Entanglements: American Policing and Israeli Expertise
  • Nalya Rodriguez: The Race Against Crime: Public Opinion of Crime Prevention in Honduras, Guatemala, El-Salvador and Mexico Between 2012 - 2016

Day 2: Saturday, 29 May 2021


9.00 PDT/ 16.00 GMT/ 19.00 Jerusalem - Keynote Address by Aida Seif el-Dawla

Prisons in Egypt: Punishment and Ongoing Violations  

10.00 PDT/ 17.00 GMT/ 20.00 Jerusalem – Postcolonial States & Colonial Carceral Legacies 

  • Martino Miceli: Imprisoning Youth: Penal Institutions in the Making of a Kanak Underclass 
  • Kellie Moss & Kristy Warren: Resisting Carceral Confinement in Guyana: Legacies of a Colonial State
  • Jaber Baker: The Syrian Gulag: Syrian Prison History 1970 – 2020
  • Walid Daka: Control Through Time  

11.30 PDT/ 18.30 GMT/ 21.30 Jerusalem – Carceral Management and Confrontation 

  • Lucia Bracco, Ana Sofia Carranza, Adriana Hildenbrand & Valeria Lindley: Resisting COVID-19 and Centering the Voice of Inmates: An Analysis of Letters Written by Imprisoned Women in Lima, Peru
  • Gurgen Tadevosyvan & Lillian Avedian: Prisoners of War: Dehumanization & Resistance in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabach Conflict
  • Carla Vargas: The Multiple Prisons: Reflections of Imprisonment 
  • Perla Arianna Allegri: Electronic Monitoring: From Mass Incarceration to Mass E-carceration 

Day 3: Sunday, 30 May 2021


9.00 PDT/ 16.00 GMT/ 19.00 Jerusalem - Keynote Address Corina Giacomello

Women Children and Prison: The Gender Dimensions of Incarceration in Latin America  

10.00 PDT/ 17.00 GMT/ 20.00 Jerusalem – Afterlives of Incarceration 

  • Sophie Lachapelle: Feeling Risky? The Subjugation of Emotional Knowledge and the Affective Violence of ‘Risk’ in the Lives of Formerly Incarcerated People in Kingston, Ontario, Canada
  • Stéphanie Latte Abdallah: An Endless Prison Web: Post-Mortem Detentions in Palestine
  • Hassan Fatafta: The Psychological and Social Impacts of a Father’s Imprisonmnet on His Children 

11.15 PDT/ 18.15 GMT/ 21.15 Jerusalem – Race, Gender and Sexuality. 

  • Carol Fadda: Gendered State Surveillance, Detention, and Incarceration in Relational and Transnational Frameworks
  • Alicia Alonso: The Disciplinary Regime in Women’s Prisons as a Patriarchal Device of Oppression
  • Chloé Constant: Postcarceral Precarity: a Critique of Social Reintegration Based on the Experiences of Trans Women in Mexico City

[Click image to download program.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412