While borders protect us from the potential danger of unwanted foreigners, carceral spaces offer the utopia of pacifying our society by constructing dystopias of confinement for its internal enemies. But who are these undesirables? Border landscapes and carceral spaces not only mark them in their unsettling otherness, but also classify them, produce knowledge about them, manage them, and constitute them as such.
In 1969 Maurice Blanchot, in an influential piece discussed by Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, and others, opened up an unusual field that displaced our way of thinking about penal confinement within sovereign territory. Blanchot’s contribution was to recognise society’s attempt to ‘enclose the outside’ (enfermer le dehors) and, by that means, constitute it into an ‘interiority of expectation or exception’. Taking up these kinds of intuitions and discussing them within contemporary conjunctures requires developing an approach capable of grasping border regimes as producers of exception and carceral management, as well as understanding carceral spaces beyond prisons as sites of dispossession, exclusion, and border containment.
This workshop invites us to think together carceral and border as sites of production of practices, discourses, knowledge, subjectivations, and institutions oriented to the management of the ‘undesirables.’ Students will have the opportunity to cross disciplinary boundaries and create challenging connections between fields usually studied separately such as border and migration studies, anthropology of confinement and urban margins, carceral geography, and mobility and security studies. To this end, we will combine fieldwork and research experiences that bring diverse approaches and scales of observation to open a space for debate and thought through the analytical framing of processes of incarceration and borderisation. We will discuss the matrix of punishment and care in the governance of ‘troubled populations,’ and ask about the role of affect and moral dispositions in the forms of coercion and resistance that take place in these regimes.
But this workshop attempts to go beyond the study of vertical (top-down) mechanisms of governance, as it also invites to approach borders and carceral spaces as critical sites of radical openness. In this way, participants are invited to think of these sites as much more than places of deprivation, that is: as spaces of resistance and refusal, but also of creativity. Thus, the workshop tackles carceral and border spaces not only as places of oppression, opening us to understand them as sites of radical possibility with the potential to produce counter-hegemonic practices and discourses.
Application form: https://forms.gle/J8K7NGBviXdaXsdq8
