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78215-01 - Seminar: Everyday Life and Prison Worlds (3 CP)
| Semester | spring semester 2026 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | Faduma Abukar Mursal (faduma.abukarmursal@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | This seminar aims to examine and theoretically engage with the shifts and changes that carceral policies and practices have undergone over the years, and how individuals respond to forms of confinement worldwide. Through engaging with a wide array of theoretical and conceptual formulations, a visit of a detention center in Switzerland, and written works by prisoners, the seminar will critically examine carceral realities and policies in their global and present-day manifestations, with a particular focus on their overlaps with everyday formation, racializing segregations, and punishment. |
| Learning objectives | - Understanding how concepts such as prison and carceral practices that seem universal may translate differently into different contexts through specific analyses of examples. - Understanding current approaches to the study of prison and carceral practices in anthropology, human geography, and urban studies, with a particular focus on everyday life, racial segregation, and punishment. - Closely analysing academic texts and their arguments, with the ability to take theori |
| Bibliography | Selected titles Bandyopadhyay, M. 2010. Everyday Life in a Prison: Confinement, Surveillance, Resistance. Orient Black Swan. Berger, D, 2014. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Right Era. The University of North Carolina Press. Davis, Angela. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Da Cunha, M. 2008. “Closed Circuits: Kinship, Neighborhood and Incarceration in Urban Portugal.” Ethnography 9, no. 3: 325–50. Darke, S., and C. Garces. 2017. “Surviving in the New Mass Carceral Zone.” Prison Service Journal 229: 2–9. Dikötter, Frank, and Ian Brown, eds. 2007. Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Cornell University Press. Fassin, Didier. 2017. Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition. Polity Press. Hetey, Rebecca C., and Jennifer L. Eberhardt. 2014. “Racial Disparities in Incarceration Increase Acceptance of Punitive Policies.” Psychological Science 25, no. 10: 1949–54. Li, Darryl. 2018. “From Exception to Empire: Sovereignty, Carceral Circulation, and the ‘Global War on Terror.’” In Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, edited by Carole McGranahan and John F. Collins. Duke University Press. Mabel O. Wilson, 2016. “Carceral Architectures: Design of the Self and the Racial Other” Superhumanity 10/16. McKittrick Katherine, 2011. ‘On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,’ Journal of Social and Cultural Geography, 12:8: 947-963. Moran, Dominique. 2012. “‘Doing Time’ in Carceral Space: Timespace and Carceral Geography.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 94, no. 4: 305–16. Wacquant, Loic. 2002. “The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Ethnography 3, no. 4: 317–97. |
| Comments | This seminar is capped at 25 students and students from other programs are welcome, with a priority for MA Critical Urbanisms and MA Changing Societies Students on timely registration. |
| Admission requirements | registration / de-registration |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| wöchentlich | Monday | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
Dates
| Date | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|
| Monday 16.02.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 23.02.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Fasnachtsferien |
| Monday 02.03.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 09.03.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 16.03.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 23.03.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 30.03.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 06.04.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Ostern |
| Monday 13.04.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 20.04.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 27.04.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 04.05.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 11.05.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 18.05.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 212 |
| Monday 25.05.2026 | 10.15-12.00 | Pfingstmontag |
| Modules |
Module: Fields: Governance and Politics (Master's degree program: African Studies) Module: Migration, Mobility and Transnationalism (Master's degree program: Changing Societies: Migration – Conflicts – Resources) Module: The Urban across Disciplines (Master's degree program: Critical Urbanisms) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment details | pass/fail |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Urban Studies |