Paper short abstract:

I extend the notion of confinement to containment to show just how socially embedded the belief in the need to contain 'Mentally Impaired Accused' people is. The consequences of this can be used instrumentally to reinforce the original justification for the containment and perpetuate the belief.

Paper long abstract:

I have developed a model of a contaminated self, that is, the way in which some groups of people are confined and managed so as to prevent them from contaminating their environment, but the poor physical and mental health that may result from these processes means it is they who are at risk of developing a contaminated self.

In applying this model to people with severe intellectual disabilities it was necessary to develop the notion of 'confinement' to more closely resemble 'containment' through the use of medication, for example, as well as segregation or physical restraint. Surveillance then becomes the handmaiden of containment to ensure its ongoing effectiveness.

I discuss this with reference to the construction and operation of a Disability Justice Centre in an Australian suburb. Despite a dogged community campaign against the centre being built in the suburb, the justice centre was eventually built to accommodate the designated 'Mentally Impaired Accused' - people who are alleged to have committed a crime but who are considered to lack the intellectual capacity to understand their crime, much less to answer for it in a court of law.

Beyond human rights breaches and miscarriages of justice, my analysis reveals a socially embedded belief in the necessity of containing some groups of people and that the consequences of this can be used instrumentally to reinforce the original justification for the containment and perpetuate the belief.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the analytical construct of confinement by examining containment practices for immigrant families in the US/Mexico borderlands, focusing on the 100-mile interior "buffer zone" in which certain rights are suspended, and specific enforcement practices that result.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the analytical construct of confinement by examining containment practices for immigrant families in the US/Mexico borderlands. The geographies of policing mobility here are distinct by virtue of the constraints of the international border, the 100-mile interior "buffer zone" in which certain rights are suspended, and specific enforcement practices. Many people are relegated to life within this small strip, and describe feeling "trapped in a cage" or "encerrados (locked up)" within an uncertain territorial space, often for decades. They experience not simply stuckness or immobility, but a ricocheting in place produced through larger bordering processes. They become "stuck in motion," experiencing simultaneous mobility and immobility, complicating traditional underpinnings of confinement as analytic construct. Based on five years of ethnographic research, this paper examines spatial restrictions produced by checkpoints in the interior (within 100 miles of the border) in interaction with other layers of surveillance in the form of roadblocks, traffic stops, and raids. While the permanent checkpoints trap people within a distinct space, temporary roadblocks and other restrictions on mobility fuel fear and uncertainty within that space. It also considers avoidance associated with the fear of driving that exposes people to apprehension, and the racialization of illegality and its effects on inspection practices. Differential possibilities occur within families and communities, producing new hierarchies based on confinement/containment. For mixed-status immigrant families, one effect is the spillover effects on those not targeted by confinement practices, since these inspection practices treat all residents, including citizens, as potentially suspect.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation deals with the repatriation of Bissau-Guinean Quran school boys in Senegal. The aim is to explore repatriation as an anti-trafficking measure and confinement strategy. Through repatriation, that confines boys to a proper place, the boys circulate between Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.

Paper long abstract:

Repatriation of Bissau-Guinean Quran school boys in Senegal who beg for their teachers named marabouts includes their 'capture' in the street, transfer to a transit centre and, if successful, confinement in their village of origin. The aim is to explore repatriation as an anti-trafficking measure and confinement strategy. Data is based on series of fieldworks in 2009-17 and focuses on the marabouts, the boys, parents, villagers and NGO staff. After being either 'captured' or having oneself 'captured' for a free ride, the boys are transported to Guinea-Bissau. Before being released, the fathers are obliged to sign a paper and promise that their sons will stay in the village, otherwise they will be taken to the court. In the village, some boys work for their parents and marabout; others stroll around in idleness. As repatriated victims of trafficking elsewhere, the boys face challenges that include stigma, mistrust and rejection at family and community level. Despite threats taking the fathers to court, most boys return to Senegal. Some keep on with Quran studies while others enter some 'trade' or recruit peers at home to beg in Senegal. Through the circulation of boys, the NGOs keep their transit centres going while some marabouts and parents use the repatriation annually as free transport ahead of the intensive labour period. The NGOs backed up by global governance, the Palermo Protocol and funds from the international community, strive to keep children in proper place. The marabouts, the religious leaders equipped with symbolic capital, master the game.

Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to deal with an immobile time in a social space of constraint? Within an anthropological understating of mental illness and confinement experiences, I reflect on the production of autobiographical narratives as ethical exercises that make people able to act on their own Self.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a ethnography carried out inside an Italian High Security Hospital for mentally ill offenders, and analyses how patients' practices of autobiographical narrative can influence the relationship with their existential experience within a confinement space - here understood not necessarily as a material space of reclusion. During my fieldwork, I dealt with a fragmented social space where time seems to collapse: people are forced to reflect on the causes of their confinement, and are stuck in a routinized time. In a place where today is identic to yesterday and tomorrow, a sort of absence of time characterizes patients' experience of confinement. However, people are not necessarily passives in front of such time collapsing. Through their reflection, they can imagine a future that allows a rethinking of their past and a manipulation of the ethical conditions that structure their present. Producing autobiographical narratives is a tactical action (de Certeau, 1980) that people enact to constitute themselves as dialectic beings-in-the-world (de Martino, 1977; Zigon, 2008). Furthermore, it implies an ethical commitment: every narration is told as the "true" story of their life. Thus, for inmates autobiographical narratives are instruments to master their present condition and to escape from a collapsing time, thus establishing an active relationship with their surrounding world. Telling-the-truth, in autobiographical narratives, is both a reflexive practice and an ethical action: the origin of a self-reflexive moral system, which informs a possible Self used by inmates to act in the world in a new relational way.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in and outside of prison in Freetown, this paper analyses how the policing of the relationships of minors and their reactions creates sexualized and confined citizenship. It analyses confinement, not as a site, but a state of being; of conflicted state-citizen relations.

Paper long abstract:

Sierra Leone passed a Sexual Offences Act in 2012 which raised the age for sexual consent to 18 officially to prevent rape. However, because the Act criminalises all sexual relationships with minors, it rendered previously legal relationships unlawful. The state now issues prison sentences of up to 15 years to boys for sleeping with underage girlfriends, forcefully separating young couples.

Based on fieldwork in and outside of prison in Freetown, this paper analyses how this policing of relationships and the reactions of affected couples creates sexualized and confined citizenship. It concentrates first on boys who have been incarcerated for sleeping with underage girlfriends and shows how these boys experience practices of necropolitics (Mbembe), leading to the disassociation of punishment and wrongdoing and to the annihilation of self and agency at the hands of the state (Guenther 1971; Le Marcis 2017) which performs these prisoners out of existence as there are officially no minors in Pademba Road prison. Secondly, it follows their girlfriends who experience both forced mobility and restrictions thereof as they are excluded from schools when visibly pregnant (Thomas 2007) and can, if at all, only rarely see their imprisoned partners. Through analysing legal and substantive forms of state practices and showing how the state and citizens shape each other through effects on their bodies, practices and personhood, the paper argues for an understanding of confinement, not as a site, but a state of being; a result of imposed sexualized citizenship and a discursive practice of conflicted state-citizen relations.

Paper short abstract:

What happens when confinement is, in a way, a choice of the confined? Reflecting on my ethnographic experience in a therapeutic community for drug addicts, this paper aims to explore the interplay between ideas of 'confinement', 'choice', and 'responsibility'.

Paper long abstract:

"You can always choose to leave. No one is stopping you. No one is keeping you". Each time one of the patients (or, rather, "guests", as they are officially called) of the therapeutic community in which I'm doing my fieldwork complains about something, this is the response she gets from the director. Individual choice and willingness is a fundamental component in this kind of addiction therapy, and yet all of the patients, in one way or another, talk of their experience as confinement, even a sort of imprisonment. But then again, very few actually leave.

In this paper I wish to reflect on what it means to choose — not once, but every day — to be confined as a therapeutic strategy, and how this confinement shapes the experience of addiction as a sickness and especially an illness. Especially because this confinement is not just a form of damage reduction, but it's supposed to be the cornerstone of the reconstruction of the addict's moral subjectivity, the first step towards his transformation into a better, "saner", person, and towards the recognition of his moral responsibility in the therapeutic process. How do this responsibility, this "freedom of choice", square with the subtraction of agency in a confinement situation? Finally, how can this voluntary, however wavering, confinement become the basis for a long-term therapeutic alliance, the turning point of the addict's moral breakdown (Zigon 2015)?

Paper short abstract:

Examining Australian policy towards boat-arriving refugees, state power reverberates across all dealings with them. When policy is punitive and objects of policy are precarious non-citizens, detention is but one expression of state power.

Paper long abstract:

In examining Australian policy towards boat-arriving refugees, state power reverberates through all dealings with these seekers of safety. Detention is but one expression of state power under a regime of punitive policy which creates precarious non-citizens.

Over 36,000 asylum seeking people exist in a state of confinement in Australian communities.

Playing on the title of Scott's 1998 book, Seeing Like a State, state "behaviour" is first examined through Australian legislation and policy directed at boat-arriving, asylum-seeking people. Foucauldian discourse analysis and Verschueren's linguistic approach are combined to illustrate how confinement of asylum-seeking peoples occurs, even when they have shown to be refugees. The futures of people who have arrived by boat in Australia since 2012 are socially engineered within a broader regime of national identity, so they are confined, separate, even as they live within communities. Prevented from ever settling permanently, these boat-arriving asylum-seeking people are denied access to a range of community services; having crossed Australia's borders unasked, they must now be contained. Corroborated by interviews with asylum-seeking people, I demonstrate how confinement is normalised and regulated, beyond the razor wire of detention.

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Paper short abstract:

The objective of this work is to analyse the confinement of transgender people in Brazil. The main argument is that this confinement is not restricted to the time that these subjects spend inside prison institutions, but remains in their bodies for a long time.

Paper long abstract:

The objective of this work is to analyse the confinement of transgender people in Brazil. The main argument is that this confinement is not restricted to the time that these subjects spend inside prison institutions, but remains in their bodies for a long time. It remains in various forms of social control and in the passage through other types of institutions - such as shelters and psychiatric wards. Anthropological fieldwork was carried out with transsexual women from the prison system in the province of São Paulo, Brazil.