Confinement Working Group presents its first talk, featuring
Mary Thomas, presenting work-in-progress from her ongoing study of American girlhood in the space of the prison: “The ambivalence of social relations in a US juvenile detention facility for girls.” Professor Thomas is an associate professor in OSU’s Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; she is the author of Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education, a co-author of Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction, and an editor for the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
The OSU Humanities Institute Working Group on Confinement seeks to engage the rich intellectual resources of prison studies while taking up an expansive understanding of the practice and places of confinement, both voluntary and involuntary: the monastery, the asylum, the retreat, the utopias, and so on. This year, the working group will be hosting a series of talks and reading groups aimed at facilitating new conversations about confinement from a global perspective. Please join us for one of our events this term. Co-leaders are Ying Zhang (History); Joey Kim (English); Melissa Anne-Marie Curley (Comparative Studies)
Our first reading group meeting will take place in December. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, the reading group will bring two pieces into conversation with each other: Marie Gottschalk’s Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics and a chapter or two from Julia Hillner’s Prison, Punishment, and Penance in Late Antiquity. In the spirit of conviviality, we have purchased a handful of copies of Caught to share with the reading group. If you are interested in joining this discussion, please contact Melissa Anne-Marie Curley (curley.32@osu.edu). Location and time TBD.
Questions about the working group can be directed to Ying Zhang (zhang.1889@osu.edu).
