GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE PRISON AND SYSTEMS OF PUNISHMENT
The prison has come to represent the modern site of punishment in today’s world. However, systems of punishment have a long history, and they included banishment and exile, forceful conscriptions, forced migration and forceful dispersal, communal separation, and confinement. Scholars have been grappling with the fluid concept of punishment both as a lived experience and an analytic category to explore how various sites of punishment – on ships, in labor camps and quarries, on islands, military camps, and penal colonies – have defined and shaped our understanding of cultures of punishment across time and place. For instance, how has the prison become the dominant site of punishment in most societies across the world today? How has the emergence of the prison transformed notions and cultures of punishment in different parts of the world? How has imprisonment been used by non-government actors in their efforts to seize or create state power?
We therefore invite submissions from scholars in all fields of history and related disciplines to a conference on “Global Perspectives on the Prison and Systems of Punishment”. This conference aspires to bring together historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars across the humanities and social sciences who are engaged in studies of systems of law and punishment, prisons, asylums, conscriptions, labor camps, and forced migration to engage in an interdisciplinary conversation aimed at exploring cultures of punishment from the 15th century to the present.