I am a Doctor now

[grue]

youll understand once you achieve something in your life

[fat lesbian]

what was ur thesis on actually anthropology is a pretty wide field

[grue]

cultural activities in prisons

[fat lesbian]

oh that sounds pretty interesting. neat

[grue]

I hope to translate it in the next few months so by then you guys can point out all the mistakes

[fat lesbian]

I do love to nitpick

[fat lesbian]

so is it focusing on prisons in Portugal or Europe? Idk anything about prison culture there. i know a lil bit about here

[grue]

oh, portuguese

social anthropology tends to be very empirical so I did fieldwork in three portuguese prisons + started a film program in a fourth to try and figure out the role of "culture" in prisons

so the text is mostly an attempt at providing a framework to think about how that relates to structures of discipline and punishment

I do connect it with recent trends in european prison management. european countries with relatively strong social states tend to differ from the american context as it's not so much the whole private storage facilities for minorities thing

but there's a bit on there that is based on the work of an american anthropologist, but I mostly just draw concepts from her because she wrote two really good papers and there's really very little written about this subject which is why I went in it in the first place

[fat lesbian]

i wanna know more but ill wait until u translate it :o

[grue]

this is the paper

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137637?seq...b_contents

I can talk a bit about it no problem, though there's a lot to unpack. I'm a little nervous about sharing the work because it's a bit vauge and all over the place, more to do with literary anthropology than what nowadays passes as "hard science" or whatever

one of the jurors wasn't a big fan but the other 6 gave me praise and I walked out with a top grade because of that. funny that the one person who didn't like it as much was also the only man in the panel. is this feminism

[grue]

the skinny is that state isntitutions are going through a "managerial shift", focusing on risk avoidance and the so-called "government-at-a-distance"

prisons walk this way too which kinda changes a lot, specially if you're going in thinkin in foucauldian terms

I found that a not so small part of this happens at the implementation of "cultural activities". and for a few decades now It Is Known that when someone says "culture" they mean a specific application of culture within a set of political discourses and intentions

so I asked what are Those, went down the rabbit hole and before I knew it I was using Rancière so I stopped and wrote a bit about it

so the thesis is mostly a reflection on this process, while trying to define the framework for what passes as cultural activities, tying it (and then untying it again) with "prison art" (thanks melissa) and in the end half-assing a couple of concepts to help think about this mess

[grue]

a bit rambling, a bit all over the place, just political enough to poke a nerve but never so much that it actually matters, the grue way

[grue]

if you want to know more abotu european prisons this has been written by my advisor and she actually knows her shit so I pretty much just quote her on everything

http://www.veratelles.net/wp-content/upl...Cunha_.pdf

[fat lesbian]

oh i assumed when u said prisons id have 2 consider Foucault

[grue]

Im in a love-hate relationship with foucault because yeah, you can't really escape using him but at the same time that's a huge problem; his descriptions are so totalizing and inescapable it's asphyxiating

and if you don't diverge a bit everything will start sounding the same

so I just use foucault on a single front, that is the panopticon as a light-shedding mechanism over prisoners (as a category)

then i do the postmodern thing of deconstruing the category

I never do let go of the bald french bastard though yeah