CARCERAL (IM)MOBILITIES: ARCHITECTURES OF THE MIGRANT CAMP, THE REFUGEE CAMP, AND THE LABOR CAMP

Berkeley architectural historians Desiree Valadares, Laura Belik, and Heba Al-Najaba offer papers on camps in Brazil, Syria, and Canada to explore how camp “architectures” have operated to shape, detain, and enable forms of movement.

As places of exception and mass incarceration, the camp constitutes a space set apart outside the boundaries of legal and civil rights. Camps are intimately related to the era of colonization and its attendant processes of invasion, occupation, disruption and relocation. They are nodes of state power and spatial manifestation of a society that periodically splinters into distinct categories based on belonging or non-belonging. This panel, comprised of architectural historians, centers its focus on the space of the camp to explore how its ‘architectures’ – the camps themselves, their spatial layout, infrastructure systems and camp-thinking – have operated to shape, detain and enable particular forms of movement. We show how models of encampment travel and shift between states by tracing the confinement of camp dwellers as diverse as drought migrants (Brazil), Syrian refugees (Jordan) and so-called “enemy aliens” of Japanese ancestry (Canada) in the 20th and 21st centuries. Paying attention to the complex mobilities involved in the carceral experience, we broach dichotomies of permanence and temporality, material and immaterial and mobility and stasis. Collectively, we aim to challenge dominant narratives of ‘crisis,’ ‘victims’ and ‘bare life’ by exploring the ways in which camps are transformed, materially and immaterially, through various forms of agency – dissent, resistance, transgression, activism, or submission and dependence – by the bodies that inhabit them.

Thursday Forum: Carceral (Im)mobilities

On this episode James talks with Erica Lorraine Williams, Assistant Professor at Spelman College and author of 'Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements.' They discuss Erica’s book, which explores how Brazil’s sex tourism industry affects Afro-Brazilian women’s lives in the Brazilian state of Bahia. They also look more broadly at how Afro-Brazilian women have been impacted by the election of president Jair Balsanaro, and the ways they have organized to resist this current regime.

You can learn more about Erica's book here: [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/67nsg8gz9780252037931.html]

How Black Feminists Activists Are Resisting Brazil’s Conservative Turn

The Center for Race and Gender (CRG) is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley that fosters explorations of race, gender, and their intersections.

Thursday Forum: Carceral (Im)mobilities

Center for Race & Gender

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