EASA Anthropology of Confinement Network Workshop 2025

Policing, incarceration, surveillance, and punishment have emerged as states’ preferred catch-all solutions to various social and political problems. Accordingly, these logics also characterize state interventions beyond traditional sites of confinement - in the provision of social welfare and housing, in mental health interventions, and the policing of public spaces, including punitive responses to public protests against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. In this workshop, we are interested in tracing the historical and ongoing synergies, intersections, and transmissions of the logics, techniques and effects of incarceration across seemingly disparate policy fields (Sharma 2020). How do these logics contribute to making confinement appear as a necessary and permanent feature of our societies? What racial, gendered, and classed structures do they reproduce? And how is the power these logics hold over our political imagination contested and disrupted? 

Over two days in June 2025, the 6th Anthropology of Confinement Network Meeting aims to bring together scholars working on carceral discourses, logics, and technologies across different policy fields: from border carceral complexes to prisons, from humanitarian confinement to mental health institutions, to social work and policing. We wish to discuss the ways in which carceral and punitive logics spread to humanitarian and social projects as well as the multifaceted dimensions of “social work” taking place in institutions of confinement, including the different ways in which sociability and action - among those exposed to confinement continuums, and movements organizing in their support - can disrupt and challenge the logics of confinement.

The meeting will be taking place at the University of Gothenburg in Göteborg, Sweden, from Monday 9 June from 12.30 to Tuesday 10 June 4 pm.

Further information:

Ulla D. Berg (uberg@lcs.rutgers.edu)

Annika Lindberg (annika.lindberg@gu.se)

Ana Ballesteros Pena (aballe05@ucm.es)

Carolina Sanchez Boe (carolina_sanchez_boe@brown.edu)