What are the political structures and effects of contemporary carceral institutions? How are they inscribed within wider cultural and political circuits of meaning in ways that shape contemporary society? How do incarcerated subjects resist their objectification and erasure within the contemporary industrial prison complex through strategies such as writing, creative production, autobiography, political protest and other modes of survival and expression? And in particular, how do certain socially opressed and politically vulnerable groups (such as women, transgender subjects, racialized subjects or political prisioners, among others) participate of these kinds of resistance and reinscription?

The international conference “Prison States and Political Embodiment” is concerned with these questions and the plurality of issues which ramify from them. By interrogating how the contemporary prison shapes cultural imaginaries and how, in turn, cultural imaginaries participate in the making – and unmaking – of hegemony, we hope to provide, through the organization of this conference, a fruitful critical occasion for the intellectual and political reflection on incarceration, embodiment and identity within contemporary carceral culture.

The conference will be held on the 7th and 8th of September 2017, at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, in Portugal. It is an initiative of Project CILM – Cities and (In)securities in Literature and Media, coordinated by principal researcher Susana Araújo, which is based at the Center for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon. The international conference will be followed by a special parallel event concerned with the same topics and articulated in a non-academic space, so as to ensure the dissemination of the critical thinking enabled in academia outside of its specific institutional limits.

For further information, see https://prisonstates.tumblr.com/about