On Monday 4th July Professor Máximo Sozzo will deliver a seminar entitled 'Prisons and power: Thinking comparatively across the Global North and South.

This will be a hybrid event held in Room S2.12 from 15:00 - 16:30.

To join us online use the following link: Join conversation (microsoft.com) 

The abstract for this paper can be found below:

In this paper I am going to present a series of theoretical and comparative notes on prisons and power, departing from a series of studies in relation to the phenomenon of “inmate governance” in Latin American prisons included in a recent book I edited (Prisons, inmates and governance in Latin America, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022) On the one hand, I am going to present some reflections on the differences between the prisons of the Global South and those of the Global North, critically discussing an approach that seeks to build an understanding of these differences through a distinction of types of regimes of confinement, allegedly characteristic of each of these different parts of the world. On the other hand, I am going to introduce the broader discussion of to what extent the theoretical tools of prison studies in the Global North can be used - and how - to make sense of the mechanisms and dynamics in the prisons of the Global South, advocating a position that defends the possibility of "use" but discourages an attitude of "application". There I will also show how, in relation to the particular question of inmate governance, a strong South-South dialogue has been produced in the last years, particularly around some key concepts like “self-governance” and “co-governance”, which also have the potentiality of influencing the ways of thinking about prison order in the Global North, and I will try to show it through some examples.