Unpacking confined lives: Generating a global research agenda on the intersection of urban marginality, displacement, and incarceration

Introduction

CONFINED will develop and validate an innovative, comparative, and global research agenda of confined lives. Confinement is a ubiquitous and unequally distributed human condition. While confinement sometimes can be protective, for some groups, not least the displaced on dangerous roads, the marginalized in urban slums, and the detained in prisons, it can be a damaging experience linked to violence and inequality.

Research Objectives

With an empirical point of departure in different contexts across the global north and south, CONFINED explores:

1. How certain people’s lives are rendered confineable.
2. How confineable groups and networks navigate discursive, actual, and potential practices of confinement.
3. How and to what extent the concept of confined lives can transform our understanding of the practices and experiences of confinement across global divides in ways that drive theoretical innovation and help build new agendas for social justice.

Methodology

Through three interdependent and sequentially organized work packages, CONFINED proposes to:

• Explore confined lives contextually and ethnographically across the global North and South (WP1).
• Compare what confines people, how they make sense of their confined lives, and how they navigate confinement (WP2).
• Conceptually develop and validate the approach through engagement with academics and experts locally and globally (WP3).

Field Work

CONFINED will carry out comparative, ethnographic fieldwork to follow precariously situated translocal family networks across four contexts as a privileged lens to understanding confined lives at the intersection of dangerous journeys, urban slums, and prisons and camps:

• Denmark and Lebanon
• South Africa and Malawi
• Thailand and Myanmar
• The UK and Sierra Leone

This will allow CONFINED to reframe the empirical field of confined lives and to generate a new conceptual language to understand one of the most important drivers of inequality worldwide.