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

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. With an empirical point of departure in different contexts across the global north and south, known to produce a variety of confined lives, 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, and 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.