Questioning Punishment
Seminar with guest speakers Anastasia Chamberlen and Henrique Carvalho from the University of Warwick.
We’d love to see you for the first seminar in the autumn on Friday the 22nd of August from 12-14. We’re very lucky to have guest speakers Anastasia Chamberlen and Henrique Carvalho joining us from the University of Warwick. They’ve done work on justice and punishment related themes e.g. related to finding beauty/joy in punitive contexts; analysis of Judge’s ‘sentencing remarks’; theoretical issues related to punishment and the pursuit of non-punitive forms of justice.
Anastasia and Henrique will give a presentation, and there’ll be plenty of time for discussion as well. Please feel free to bring your lunch!
The authors describe their presentation as follows…
In this presentation, we will present and discuss some of the main themes and ideas in our recently published book, Questioning Punishment. In the book, we question punishment as concept, social phenomenon and contemporary practice. The book unpacks punishment’s nature and the assumptions that underpin it, examines its targets, objectives and implications, locates punishment and punitivity within their social contexts, and aims to unsettle the idea that there is something common-sensical, necessary and unavoidable about punitive justice.
The presentation will introduce the book’s main argument and methodology and then will go through the book’s innovative structure organised around five central questions: what punishment is; who punishment’s targets and subjects are; how punishment is perpetuated and experienced; when and where punishment unfolds; and why we punish. The presentation will end, like the book, by considering the implications of this enquiry to understandings and practices of punishment and to broader pursuits of justice.