Convenors
Luca Daminelli, University of Genova
luca.daminelli@edu.unige.it
Chiara Martini, University of Milano
chiara.martini@unimi.it, martini.chiara27@gmail.com
Sara Marilungo, Sapienza University of Roma
sara.marilungo@uniroma1.it
Giovanni Marenda, University of Genova
giovanni.marenda@edu.unige.it
Carcerality today extends well beyond the prison and the detention centre. Carceral logics and practices are diffused across a wider constellation of institutions, legal regimes, infrastructures, and everyday mechanisms of surveillance, discipline, and control, which together regulate mobility, labour, residence, and belonging, producing uneven and differentiated forms of inclusion and exclusion across and beyond Europe’s territory.
This session draws on the material and symbolic expansion of carceral spaces under the European Union’s New Pact on Asylum and Migration, which normalises detention as a key instrument to control human mobility (Campesi 2023), while simultaneously externalising it, relocating carceral infrastructures beyond EU borders and transforming the Mediterranean and Balkan borderlands into extended zones of confinement (Stierl 2021; Tazzioli 2023). Efforts to detect and detain migrants increasingly stretch borders across and beyond nation-states, transforming territories into dispersed carceral landscapes where non-citizens face surveillance, capture and control. Within this expanded geography, evictions, deportability, precarious labour regimes and everyday surveillance function as “carceral events” (Vilenica et al. 2022), disciplining racialised bodies through the constant threat of detainability (De Genova 2019), dispossession (Fraser 2023; Brito 2023) and confinement. Europe thus emerges as an archipelago (Mbembe 2019; Rexhepi 2023): a set of dispersed yet interconnected geographies encompassing detention centres, hotspots, informal settlements, humanitarian infrastructures, and digital surveillance systems, bound together by shared logics of exclusion, containment, and differential inclusion.
The session invites contributions that explore how these carceral formations are produced, experienced and contested across EU and its externalised borders, approaching these analysis through the prism of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, examining the consequences, reconfigurations and shifting dynamics it engenders. We particularly welcome papers examining: (1) the geographies of confinement and the proliferation of carceral spaces across borders, cities and peripheral regions; (2) the intersections between race, coloniality and contemporary border regimes, and the ways these shape racialised mobility governmentality; (3) transformations in the relationship between labour, capital and differential inclusion in the context of the expansion of detention infrastructures; (4) everyday practices of resistance, and mobilisation, developed by migrants, activists and civil society actors, including their ambiguities, failures and unintended effects; (5) the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting ethnographic research in highly securitised, inaccessible and politically contested settings.
We wish to bring into dialogue scholars, people with migratory background, activists, social workers, legal practitioners around a shared object of inquiry: the spatial, temporal and relational architecture of contemporary migrants’ carcerality. As detention becomes institutionalised and resistance practices evolve, ethnography offers powerful tools for examining carcerality’s everyday workings alongside the solidarity and contestation it provokes, enabling to highlight not only the repressive and disciplinary effects of the multiplication of carceral practices, but also the unexpected outcomes that emerge in the interstices of carceral architectures. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue across empirical contexts, the session contributes to current debates on borders, racialisation, and the changing nature of migration governmentality in Europe and beyond.
Open questions
- How does the New Pact on Asylum and Migration reshape the geographies and practices of carcerality in Europe and beyond?
- How do detention centres, border infrastructures, camps, reception facilities and everyday urban and rural spaces form a dispersed yet interconnected geography of carcerality across and beyond Europe?
- How do race, coloniality and racial capitalism shape contemporary European carceral regimes and their political, legal and moral justifications?
- How do labour regimes intersect with carceral logics to produce new forms of exploitable, deportable and disposable populations? How is the concept of differential inclusion being reshaped by the widespread of carceral practices?
- What forms do “carceral events” take beyond formal sites of detention, and how do they govern racialised bodies?
- How do people subjected to carceral logics experience, narrate, negotiate and contest confinement, mobility control and bordering in their everyday lives?
- What tactics of refusal, legal mobilisation, solidarity and collective resistance have emerged in response to expanding carceral practices, and with what possibilities and limits?
- What methodological and ethical challenges arise in conducting ethnographic research in and around carceral spaces, particularly in highly securitised and inaccessible settings?
- Where do carceral logics falter, producing contradictory effects or generating unexpected relations? What can ethnography reveal in order to rethink and further develop the concepts of carcerality and differential inclusion in the context of the New European Pact?
Keywords
carcerality; detention; (im)mobility; borderland; labour extraction; racialisation, counter-practices.
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
sociology of migration; critical border studies; migration studies; critical criminology; anthropology of migration; sociology of prison.
References
Brito, T., 2023. “(Dis)Possessive Borders, (Dis)Possessed Bodies: Race and Property at the Postcolonial European Borders”, in International Political Sociology, 17, 2.
Campesi, G., 2024. “Regulating mobility through detention: Understanding the new geography of control and containment at the Southern European border”, in Theoretical Criminology, 28(4), 554-576.
De Genova, N., 2019. “Detention, deportation, and waiting: Toward a theory of migrant detainability”, in Gender a výzkum, 20(1), 92-104.
Fraser, N., 2019. “Is Capitalism Necessarily Racist?” Politics/Letters 15, http://quarterly.politicsslashletters.org/is-capitalism-necessarily-racist/
Mbembe, A., 2019. “Bodies and Borders // Achille Mbembe // aMp 2019”, Universitaet zu Koeln, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqreV_1FqtU.
Rexhepi, P., 2023. White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route, Durham, Duke University Press.
Stierl, M., 2021. “The Mediterranean as a carceral seascape”, in Political Geography, 88:102417.
Tazzioli, M., 2023. Border Abolitionism. Migrants’ containment and the genealogies of struggles and rescue, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Vilenica, A., McElroy, E., Lancione, M., Thompson, S., et al, 2022. “Carcerality, housing precarity, and abolition”, in Radical Housing Journal, 4, 1.
Convenors’ bio
Luca Daminelli is a precarious postdoc researcher at the University of Genoa. His work focuses on temporal borders, migrant labour exploitation, and processes of (de)bordering and resistance across the European borderland.
Chiara Martini holds a PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research from the University of Milan. Her work examines bordering and de‑bordering processes, regimes of confinement, and forms of solidarity from below along the Balkan Routes, with a particular focus on Greece, Bulgaria, and Bosnia‑Herzegovina.
Sara Marilungo is a PhD candidate in Political Studies at Sapienza University of Rome. Her research interests concern critical border and migration studies, focusing on the decolonial perspective applied to border regimes. Her ethnographic and militant research has focused on mobility across Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Giovanni Marenda is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences within the Migrations and Intercultural Processes track at the University of Genoa. His research focuses on borders, migrant labor exploitation, mechanisms of confinement and detention in Greece, Bulgaria, and the Balkan region.