Dr Basil Farraj, Ms Mai Al-Battat, and Dr Hashem Abushama
Funding period: 1 October 2025 – 1 April 2026
Type of funding:
Seminar Series
Partner organisations: Ibrahim Abu Lughod Institute of International Studies, Birzeit University (Palestine), the International Center for Arab and Islamic Studies of the Federal University of Sergipe (CEAI-UFS) (Brazil), and La Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (Bogotá, Colombia)
Events: November 2025 (Sergipe, Brazil), December 2025 (Bogotá and Cúcuta, Colombia), March 2026 (Palestine)
Organisers: Dr Basil Farraj (Birzeit University), Ms Mai Al-Battat (Birzeit University), and Dr Hashem Abushama (University of Oxford)
Contact: Dr Basil Farraj
Abstract:
The ‘Urban Geographies of Carcerality: From Latin America to the Middle East’ seminar series addresses 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 vintage point, the series is concerned with clarifying how global forces of capitalist accumulation and (post)colonial violence show up in urban spaces. The seminar series will address the circuits and geographies structuring carceral practices across both regions and the ways in which these practices relate to each other. The main objective is to clarify how we might devise an urban methodological approach that takes account of the specific and the local without neglecting the global.
How does carcerality show up in the city? How are urban forms of carcerality articulated to patterned modes of differentiation along the axes of race, gender, and class? How do we think of carcerality not as all-encompassing but as a contested relation, against which many practices of resistance converge? What happens if we think relationally about the Middle East and Latin America, not as two locations for seamless, downward articulation of global forces, but as critical, specific nodes that are productive of both crucial practices of resistance and conceptual knowledge? Is the language of ‘relationality’ already a ground for thinking about solidarity between these seemingly disparate geographic locations? This seminar series addresses these questions that work against the provincialization of Global South locations as too ethnographically specific to be in conversation with one another.
The seminar series will organize four events: three in hybrid format, and the fourth in virtual format. The first seminar titled, ‘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,’ asks questions related to confronting and resisting carceral geographies.