States of Captivity

**UPDATED CONFERENCE PROGRAM**

(click on the link for “Conference Program”)

States of Captivity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Incarceration, Rendition, and Detention

Friday 27th and Saturday 28th, February 2009

The Duke University Cultural Anthropology Department and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Anthropology have collaborated in planning this conference, which invites participants to reflect on the overlaps among the prison, military, and immigration industries in North Carolina and elsewhere. It is becoming harder to ignore the social crises caused by logics and practices of containment.  Incarceration rates in the U.S. have grown since the 1980s, while prisons have become increasingly industrialized and central to economies at every scale. The intensification and militarization of border security is accompanied by a proliferation of government, contracted, and vigilante police forces that seek to capture, detain, and deport undocumented people.  Finally, the outsourcing of detention centers to far-flung corners of the globe and the uncharted itineraries of “ghost planes” that carry out extraordinary rendition have made raising awareness of detainee abuse and torture exceedingly difficult. This conference seeks engagement with perspectives from scholarship and praxis, in order to contest and connect practices of incarceration, rendition, and detention today.

The 2009 Duke-UNC Graduate Conference Planning Committee