Carceral power, in its formations and formulations, increasingly shapes the global condition. From El Salvador’s mega-prisons to Israel’s legal “black holes,” from mass incarceration in the US to Assad’s prison state in Syria, incarceration has become a mode of state warfare against civilians and dissidents. Lebanon, where prisons are molded by decades of colonial intervention, military occupations, and brutalizing state neglect, exemplifies this phenomenon. As war engulfs Lebanon once again, it becomes clear that carceral power extends far beyond prison walls – its violent effects reverberate, constraining and shaping conditions of survival at every turn. This doctoral dissertation project looks then to formerly incarcerated women to guide understandings both of the reach of carceral power and possibilities of living. Through life history interviews and other creative ethnographic methods, I seek not only to draw out carceral effects in the everyday but also to envision collaboratively a future beyond carceral warscapes. 

I am deeply inspied by what anthropologist Lisa Stevenson has called "imagistic knowledge," a form of knowledge that makes room for uncertainty, contradiction, and for experiences that cannot be verbalized. Before Stevenson, Walter Benjamin wrote about "thought-images" in his memoir Berlin Childhood Before 1900. Thought-images are pieces of writing in which image and thought cannot be separated. They speak to the imagistic nature of memory: memories come to us in images, sounds, senses, feeling. In my work, I combine sensory, aural, imagistic knowledge as well as creative/artistic expressions to fully and faithfully encapsulate the complexity of human experience. I experiment with this in personal side projects such as those below.