6th International Conference: Carcerality, Borders and Mobility

Carceral Geography Working Group

15-16 September, 2026 -Universität Trier, Germany

The 6th International Conference for Carceral Geography draws together research exploring carcerality, borders and mobility, as well as theoretical work, including on carceral space, abolition, anti-colonial, post- and decoloniality, queer and feminist theory, social reproduction, and political economy.

Call for Papers closed. Find Call for Papers here

You can also access the Conference Program here

Conference Program

Our program welcomes carceral geographers from North and South America, Europe, Africa, South Asia and Australia and highlights the Carceral Geography Working Group’s growing global research community.

Contact Information: 2026ICCG@gmail.com

Registration is now open to all

Link to Registration

All attendees must register for the conference. There is no registration fee but we are asking those attendees with conference funding to contribute if they can. Voluntary registration fees support future conferences and bursaries for early career and under-represented researchers.

When you register, you will be asked about any accessibility needs, for your name and affiliation and whether you would like to attend the evening social events. Social events will be at attendees’ expense and the conference organisers are not responsible for arranging allergy or dietary requirements. The restaurants can likely cater for any needs, but attendees’ should speak to the restaurant if they have specific requirements.

Travel Information

On this page, you will find details on how to reach the conference venue and where to stay during Conference.

Conference Timetable

Tuesday

08:30 Registration desk open

9am: Welcome and Opening Remarks

9:15-10:15 Plenary 1

10:30-12:15 Session 1A, 1B, 1C

12:15-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:30 Plenary 2

14:45-16:30 Session 2A, 2B, 2C

16:45-18:30 Session 3A, 3B

19:30 Dinner at Pizza Club (at attendees’ expense)

Pizza Club website and menu available here.

Wednesday

09:00 Registration desk opens

9:30-11:15 Session 4A, 4B, 4C

11:30 – 13:15 Session 5A, 5B, 5C

13:15-14:45 Lunch

14:45-16:30 Session 6A, 6B

16:30-17:00 Closing Discussion Session

18:00 Meet for informal drinks and snacks in central Trier at the “Weinstand” (at attendees’ expense)

Information about Trier’s Weinstand available here.

Program of Sessions

Plenary 1:

What is a camp?
Keynote Speaker: Prof Claudio Minca

Abstract: Although the 20th century has been described as the ‘century of camps’, the first decades of the new millennium have seen a further increase in the number of camps of all kinds, with growing populations residing in them. Long regarded as temporary institutions associated with emergency situations or repressive totalitarian regimes, camps are now being studied as essential political technologies for managing and controlling ‘unwanted’ populations. As such, many consider them to be a fundamental element in the reproduction of the nation state. While much contemporary research focuses on refugee camps, other forms of forced encampment are receiving relatively little attention, despite the significant interest generated by the concentration camps associated with the ‘war on terror’ launched by the Bush administration some 25 years ago. In this lecture, drawing from my research on the Balkan Route, I will engage with current debates on these issues, interrogating the camp as a biopolitical geographical formation and I will ask whether it is possible — and useful — to categorise institutions that differ greatly in terms of management practices, the populations they house, and their spatio-temporal regimes under the same conceptual umbrella.

Professor Claudio Minca is Professor of Geography in the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna, where he also serves as the Department’s Delegate for Research. An internationally recognised cultural geographer, his research explores spatial theory, biopolitics, borders, mobility and has engaged extensively with Giorgio Agamben and spatialities of the camp. His recent books include Thinking like a Route (2026, with Yolanda Weima), A Spatial Theory of the Camp (2025, with Richard Carter-White), Appunti di Geografia (2022), and Camps Revisited (2019). He is Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant TheGAME, which examines informal refugee mobilities along the Balkan Route.

Plenary 2:

Epistemic Carcerality: (Non-)Knowledge and the Production of Geographies of Migrant Disappearance
Keynote speaker: Dr Maurice Stierl

Abstract: We do not know how many people ‘on the move’ die and disappear during migration journeys across bordered space. This absence of knowledge may at first sight appear surprising, given our time, in which (certain) migratory mobilities are heavily tracked and surveilled, where significant resources are invested in forms of knowledge production that seek to understand, possibly even forecast, migratory trajectories, more often than not with the intention to stall, contain, deter. Then again, it may not surprise if we consider the very fact of not knowing as a form of epistemic violence and therewith a key dimension of necropolitical borders, retaining families and communities of the disappeared in never-ending states of unknowing, hoping, searching. Building on this premise, my talk explores what it calls epistemic carcerality in relation to the disappeared of migration. Counter-intuitively, I examine carceral effects that result from the very epistemic practices that seek to shed light on the phenomenon of migrant death and disappearance – attempts to count and document the disappeared across border zones.

Dr Maurice Stierl is a researcher at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), Osnabrück University, where he leads the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded project “The Production of Spaces of Migrant Disappearance”. His research lies at the intersection of political geography, international political sociology, and migration and border studies, with a particular focus on migrant struggles, border violence, disappearance, and knowledge production across Europe and North Africa. He previously led the Production of Knowledge on Migration research group. As the author of Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe (Routledge, 2019) and numerous articles on migrant struggles and politics of migration research, his work has reshaped critical debates on migrant agency, resistance, solidarity, and contemporary border regimes.

Visual Exhibit: MAPPING – GEOGRAPHIES OF INCARCERATION

Sarah Friedel, Researcher, TU Berlin

Sessions

Session 1A: Beyond the Carceral: Confinement within Global Capitalism

• Why a camp? The refugee camp and capitalism’s contradictory logics. Chi-Chi Shi, Durham University, UK.
• Hunger strikes as strikes: Collective resistance against the extraction of life in immigration detention. Dr Lucy Kneebone, London School of Economics, UK.
• Borders Without Bars: Immobilisation, Differential Integration, and the Selective Limits of Confinement. Dr Timor Landherr, University of Erfert, Germany.
• Beyond the Borders of Berlin: Black Resistance to Deportation and Asylum in Germany. Aino Korvensyrjä, University of Bristol, UK.
• The European Union’s “new” energy-border complex: controlling bodies and minerals in Mauritania. Samu Kuoppa, Tampere University, Finland.

Session 1B: Everyday Prison Experiences and Post-Imprisonment

• Rethinking African Philosophy in Prison Governance: The value of Ubuntu and Ti jaa bonyeni among prisoners in Ghana. Unusah Aziz, Leeds University, UK.
• Contesting “the Family” in the Carceral Prison Regime: Perspectives from Practitioners in Switzerland. Nina Etter, University of Bern, Switzerland.
• Algerian Prisoners in La Santé. Shirley Le Penne, Cornell University / Sciences Po, Paris, France.
• Reconfiguring Carceral Space: Community Mediation and the Spatial Politics of Transformative Justice. Giulia Villabruna, University of Genoa, Italy.

Session 1C: New Materialist Carceral Geographies

• Porous Enclosure: Art, Access and Relationality between prison and city in Milan. Gianfranco Orsenigo, Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
• Moving Beyond Boundaries: Affective Encounters in Carceral Space. Martin Böhnel, HES-SO Wallis, Switzerland.
• The Nonhuman in Zones of Abandonment and Incarceration- A New Materialist Read on Borders and Detention Camps. Julia Heinle, Independent Researcher.
• A Quantum Elephant in the Room-an Entangled Hauntology of Prison. Lucy Campbell, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Session 2A: Postcolonial Carceralities

• Carceral Geography and the Making of Israeli Apartheid. Smadar Ben-Natan, University of Oregon, USA.
• Digital Carcerality in Postcolonial India: From Colonial Control to Datafied Borders. Rahul Andhana, University of Hyderabad, India.
• Adivasi Labourers in the Plantations: Understanding Mobility in the Global South. Ansiya Rahiman, Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
• Trafficking and sex work across water borders of Indian Ocean World. Amrita DasGupta, SOAS University of London, UK.

Session 2B: Architecture and Localisation of Carceral Institutions

• Brick, Iron, and the Politics of Storage: Victorian Genealogies of the Warehouse Prison. Dominique Moran, University of Birmingham, UK.
• Difficult Distance: Examining Carceral Access Negotiations. Caitlin MacKinlay, Durham University, UK.
• The Italian Guantánamo: A Sardinian prison that became a detention center. Marco Nocente, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca.
• Building the Penal Ethos. Astrid Witt Rosenberg, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Session 2C: Urban Perspectives in Carceral Geography

• New Forms of Racialized Urbanism: Migrations and Postsocialist Transformations in Europe’s Southeastern Borderlands. Martino Zibetti, Univ. College Cork; Azra Hromadžić, Syracuse Univ.; Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Aston Univ.
• Towards ‘Public Panopticons’: An Examination of Everyday Carcerality in Smart City Mission, India. Ratnadeep Maitra, Shiv Nadar University, India.
• Carceral and urban entanglements: Everyday life and experiences in Montevideo, Uruguay. Lauren Isach, Independent Researcher.
• The Camp as Urban Infrastructure: Emergency, Mobility and Diffuse Carcerality in Contemporary Italy. Sonia Paone, University of Pisa, Italy.
• Make-shift cells and the patterning of community life. Lara Palombo, Macquarie University, Australia.

Session 3A: Bordering and Carcerality

• Living in Transit: Differentiated Geographies of Asylum in Serbia’s Camp System. Jessica Collins-Bojovic, Australian Catholic University.
• Jurisdiction without Bars: Law as Carceral Space in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland. Meghashree Dev, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India.
• Carceral Geographies of Refugee Camps: A Literary-Anthropological Study of Select Refugee Life Narratives. Anju Mathew, Pondicherry University, India.
• Circulating Confinement: How Borders Make Mobility Carceral. Avni Bahri, Jindal Global University, India.
• After the Tribunal: Carceral Borders, Circulation, and the Social Life of Uncertainty in Assam’s Citizenship Regime. Debasreeta Deb, University of Hyderabad, India.

Session 3B: Exploring Open Prisons as part of the Carceral Geographic Landscape.

• Beyond the label: conceptualizing “Open Prisons” and their realization of the principle of normalization. Elena Larrauri, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Cristina Güerri, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
• The emotional geography of women’s open prisons. Daria Przybylska, University of Cambridge, UK.
• Social Control Beyond the Closed Estate: An Exploration of Women’s Open Prisons in Germany. Anna Schliehe, Universität Trier, Germany.
• A functional perspective on open prisons and a halfway house in Iceland. Francis Pakes, University of Portsmouth, UK.

Session 4A: Explorations in Carceral Geography

• Authors meet Readers with Professor Claudio Minca and Yolanda Weima (University of Bologna, Italy).
  Book under discussion: Thinking Like a Route – Counter-geographies of Informal Migration in the Balkans (Publication Date: 2026; Available open access).
• Session Chairs: Anna Schliehe and Christophe Mincke.

Session 4B: Film Screening

• TBC: The Land of Open Graves: Borders, Mobility, and Cinematic Perception in El Mar La Mar.
• Presenter and Moderator: Denis Gruenemeier.

Session 4C: Gendered Carceral Geographies

• Between Exposure and Erasure: The Carceral Life of Women’s Visibility. Dr. Mithula Thomas, Vellore Institute of Technology, India.
• Voices that Transcend Confinement: Pedagogical–Artistic Practices in Women’s Prisons in Chile. Amaranta Úrsula Espinoza and Ainhoa Olavarría Jofré, Independent researchers and members of the non-academic organisation La Salvaja in Santiago, Chile.
• Oblique Intra-actions: Zines, Mutual Aid, and Queer Migrant Counterpublics in Ireland. Jessie Sutphin, University College, Cork.
• The Campus–Prison Continuum: Gendered Experiences of Negotiating Carceral Culture in India. Indu Kumari, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

Session 5A: Carceral Mobilities & Immobilities I

• Roads as Carceral Spaces: The Politics of Roadblocks, Uneven Mobility and Everyday negotiations along National highway-2 in Manipur, India. Anurag Das, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
• A monastery under arrest: Disciplined mobility experienced by a religious group. Ekaterina Lüdke, Universität Trier, Germany.
• The difficult legitimisation of prisons in the age of mobility. Towards a doubling-up of the carceral system. Christophe Mincke, National Institute for Criminalistics and Criminology (NICC), Belgium.

Session 5B: Gendered Carceral Geographies II

• Bounded Mobility: Gender, Carcerality, and the Indian Diaspora in Germany. Sanchali Sarkar, University of Passau, Germany.
• The Silent Death of Western Feminisms: Carceral Space, Gendered Dispossession, and Gazan Women’s Resistant Praxis. Fatimaezzahra Abid, Postdoctoral Researcher.
• Margins of Gendered Deviance: Incarcerated Women and Prison Epistemologies. Achu John, Central University of Kerala, India.
• Migrant shelters for women in transit through Mexico as liminal places of hospitality and confinement. Lama Boustani, University of Montreal, Canada.

Session 5C: Abolitionist Approaches to Carceral Geography

• Carceral and abolitionist geographies of Housing First units in Finland. Virve Repo, University of Tampere, Finland.
• Decolonizing Carceral Resistance: Bridging Political Economy and Decolonial Criminology. Mohammed Jahirul Islam, Carleton University, Canada.
• Stars Behind Razor Wire: The Carceral Sky and Abolitionist Horizons in the Aegean. Aila Spathopoulou, University of Stirling, UK.
• Carceral biometrics and debiasing as reformism. Sarah Fathallah, University of Cambridge, UK

Session 6A: Migration and Carceral Geography

• The colonial logics of bureaucracies: migrant detention, confinement and autonomies at the borderlands. Erika Herrera Rosales, University of Warwick, UK.
• Carceral Immigration in India. Deepak Kumar, Bennett University, India.
• From a ‘Migration Crisis’ to a Crisis of the Human: An Anticolonial Reading of the ‘problem of the 21st century‘. Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa, London School of Economics/Aston University.
• The Carceral Logics of Asylum Appeals in England and Wales. Belinda Rawson, University of Warwick, UK.
• Contesting Immigration Detention and Removal in North East England: local encounters with Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre. Renzo Szkwarok, Newcastle University, UK

Session 6B: Gendered Carceral Geographies III

• From Wounds to Meaning: Relational and Culturally Embedded Resilience in the Lives of Indonesian Incarcerated Women with Histories of Intimate Partner Violence. Dian Veronika Sakti Kaloeti, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia.
• Comparing women’s experiences of imprisonment across borders. Anna Schliehe, Universität Trier, Germany.
• Gendered Justice in the Punitive City: Techno-Carceral Circuits of Exclusion for Women. Gemma Birkett, City St. Georges, University of London, UK.
• Green space in women’s prisons: spatial inequalities, wellbeing, and self-harm. Megan Davidson, University of Manchester, UK.
• Family care as carceral governmentality: a study of the role of women visits in the federal system in Argentina. Victoria Pereyra Iraola, Ludiwg-Maximillian Universität.

Contact Information: 2026ICCG@gmail.com