Geographies of Carcerality and the City: From Palestine to Latin America

In this guest post, Dr Basil Farraj (Birzeit University, Palestine), Ms Mai Al-Battat (Birzeit University, Palestine), and Dr Hashem Abushama (University of Oxford, United Kingdom) share their research on
Urban geographies of carcerality: from Latin America to the Middle East, funded by a USF Seminar Series Awards grant.  This seminar series will explore the unsettling connections between geographies of carcerality in Latin America and the Middle East, shedding light on how global forces play out in our urban spaces.  A series of events will take place in November (Sergipe, Brazil) and December (Bogotá and Cúcuta, Colombia) of 2025, as well as in  March 2026 (Palestine).

The analysis of carcerality is essential to understanding the violent practices and policies shaping the lives of populations worldwide. Such policies proliferate and manifest in public and private spaces, in cities, and through the laws enacted by ruling regimes. Seen this way, the ‘carceral’ does not simply refer to prisons as locations of incarceration. Rather, it extends to the transformation of urban space, public institutions, cities, and states into carceral and penal locations (Wacquant 2000; Moran 2015; Hajjar 2005), where populations are marginalised, racialised, policed, dispossessed and subjected to the constant gaze of power (Graham 2011; Sa’di 2021; Khalili 2013).

Recent studies in carceral geography have pushed for a broadening of what the carceral means, arguing that ‘the carceral’ is not easily fixed (Turner 2016). This critical carceral geography agenda, especially after the ‘mobilities turn’ (Moran 2015), extended the analysis of carcerality and carceral geographies to include analyses of broader carceral logics influencing urban space, legal policies, migrant detention centres, military homes, security practices, and tactics of surveillance. This approach follows and investigates how the ‘prison space’ proliferates in our everyday lives as a relation that shapes our lived experiences. In this sense, expanding the notion of ‘carcerality’ has enabled a thorough investigation of how its logics and manifestations affect marginalised populations, how it reshapes urban fabrics to enact logics of surveillance and, crucially, how people devise multiple strategies and tactics of resistance against it. Seeing carcerality as a ‘relation’ also means seeing its local articulations of people, objects, policies and practices as part and parcel of a global mode of carcerality (Moran 2015; Gill et al. 2016).

The porous boundaries of the carceral are highlighted by the flows and circulations taking place across carceral settings, including the mobility and circulation of carceral tactics and violent practices (Hajjar 2006; Li 2018; Gregory 2006), the circulation of security and surveillance knowledge (Graham 2011, Sa’di 2021, Li 2006, Cook 2013), and the proliferation of discourses categorising entire populations as ‘dangerous’, ‘unwanted’, and ‘security threats. Despite these violent formations, confrontation practices continually emerge within carceral settings and can similarly be traced and seen as mobile across carceral and national boundaries. Prisoners’ movements have offered us many archives of the past and the present of escape and smuggling.

Confinement presupposes flight. For as long as carceral logics have existed, prisoners have smuggled poems, novels, studies, artworks, and notes. They use hunger strikes and blanket protests. They organise committees. Carceral logics are both undermined by such acts of resistance and constituted by them. Such logics of carcerality, in their various manifestations, inform our world today. The Palestinian people, for instance, have been subject to a decades-long military occupation that has not only transformed historic Palestine into a carceralized geography but has entrapped an entire population, subjecting it to brutal tactics of control, violence, torture, fragmentation, and imprisonment, including an estimated one million Palestinians who have passed through Israeli prisons since 1948. Israeli carceral tactics have intensified since the genocidal war began in October 2023. These carceral tactics, however, do not show up only in Palestine, but have been made mobile and transferable across national boundaries, including the global market of arms, technology and security apparatus, constituting connections between carceral locations.

This seminar, ‘Urban Geographies of Carcerality: from Latin America to the Middle East,’ will address the connections between geographies of carcerality in Latin America and the Middle East, two regions witnessing ever-increasing levels of urban violence, surveillance, and incarceration. By taking ‘carcerality’ in the city as its vantage point, the series is concerned with clarifying how global forces of capitalist accumulation, (post)colonial violence and patriarchy show up in urban spaces and extend to spaces of confinement. It will address the circuits and geographies structuring the circulation and mobility of carceral practices across both regions, and the ways in which these practices relate to each other.

The seminar series will organise four events: three in hybrid format and the fourth in virtual format. The first seminar, ‘The Intersections of Settler Colonialism and Capitalist Urbanization: From Latin America to the Middle East,’ aims to theoretically relate modes of urban carcerality to the long histories of settler colonialism and capitalist formations across Latin America and the Middle East. The second seminar, ‘Everyday Urban Spaces of Carcerality,’ tackles manifestations of carcerality in urban spaces, including surveillance, urban policing, migrant detention centres, and segregation of populations. The third seminar, ‘Feminist Geographies of Urban Carcerality,’ expands the analysis of urban carcerality and investigates gendered modes of urban carcerality in homes, prisons, public spaces, and employment positions. The final seminar, ‘Everyday Urban Spaces of Confrontation,’ investigates questions of how to confront and resist carceral geographies, envision counterspaces, and experiment with processes such as countermapping.

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