Towards the making of prison in a transnational scope: sociotechnical networks of care, and modulations within the São Paulo women's penitentiary (PFC/SP)

• Grant number: 18/14726-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: January 01, 2019
• End date: July 03, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Urban Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Vera da Silva Telles
• Grantee: Bruna Louzada Bumachar
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project intends to go deeper into the reflections developed during my doctoral thesis. From the care perspective, the focus lies on the investigation of modulation processes within the Sao Paulo Women's Penitentiary (Penitenciária Feminina da Capital - PFC, São Paulo-SP). The doctoral theses aimed to understand how the incarceration in this institution pushes the imprisoned estrangeiras (female foreigners) to move across the body boundaries as an attempt to surpass the transnational boundaries of the prison when it comes to the relationships through and around their children. In turn, this postdoctoral research intends to verify how such movements, lying or extending across, conform the ever-changing limits of the prison. Not only the estrangeiras who are serving time in the PFC, including their relatives living abroad, but also other human and nonhuman agents integrate the universe of the present research. They are clearly in constant relationship, both inside and outside the prison, with practices as well as techniques of care. Taking the 'question of mobilities' (Telles, 2010a) as the analytical starting point, the main purpose is to auscultate the means through which the streams discharged by these women, within the relationships with their relatives, modulate the prison in which they are. These auscultations rise from the (sociotechnical) care networks weaved in both bodily as well as transnational scope. The methodology includes a field research multi-situated (Marcus, 1995) within and without the prison, in Brazil and elsewhere. The preferential environment to materialize this work will be my voluntary engagement in two institutions located in Sao Paulo: the Federal Public Defender's Office, and the Work, Land and Citizenship Institute. In addition to that, video letters will be produced and interchanged between the estrangeiras and their relatives living abroad.