The first 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 seminar comprises several events held in partnership with the International Center for Arab and Islamic Studies of the Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil. The events will take place between November 14 – 19, and include film screenings, city tour, workshops, seminars, and meetings with activist groups. Participation is welcome for those who might be present in Sergipe during that period. The detailed description of the events is as follows:
Militarisation vs. collective imagination: countermanding of university spaces
At times of high militarisation, ongoing genocides, and a growing global interest in imagination and in people’s right to directly shape their urban realities, this workshop invites university students to reflect on the relationship between violence, space, and creative resistance and knowledge production.
The workshop begins with Mai, focusing on her previous work exploring imagination as a tool for urban justice. It is followed by a hands-on component, where students will engage in the co-creation of countermaps of the university spaces. Through this collective practice, the workshop seeks to uncover the everyday limitations imposed on imagination within urban life, while highlighting the urgency of radical imagination as an act of imaginative rediscovery—both individual and collective.
Urban Carcerality and State Violence
Description: The seminar ‘Everyday Urban Spaces of Carcerality’ tackles manifestations of carcerality in urban spaces, including surveillance, urban policing, migrant detention centres and segregation of populations. Specifically, the seminar will discuss the ways in which the Israeli settler colonial regime has effectively converted Palestine into localised spaces of confinement, utilising carceral tactics to further surveil and police the occupied Palestinian population. This includes the systematic reliance on detention as central to Israel’s carceral project, the permit regime, and the everyday violence inflicted across Palestine. The seminar hopes to bring forth a discussion on the connections between urban spaces of violence in Latin America and those put in place by the Israeli settler-colonial regime.