Stanford Humanities Center
The Department of Anthropology, Concerning Violence: A Collaborative Research Group, and Law and Literature in the Global South are hosting Graham Denyer Willis, as part of an open-ended conversation with others concerned by a world of global inequalities. This conversation would begin with an interrogation of why Brazil has built nearly 1,500 prisons in the last four decades, with a veritable explosion in more recent decades. Denyer Willis poses this "punitive development model" as a "prison consensus" and seeks to examine its effect on social and political life since the end of the Cold War, asking who benefits and why. We seek to have a conversation with people interested in similar developments of incarceration around the world.
About the Speaker
Graham Denyer Willis is Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Geography at Queens' College, Cambridge. Denyer Willis is a political ethnographer interested in practices and assumptions of power amidst inequality, who is especially motivated to identify and question forms of entrapment and escape from power and capitalism, particularly in cities of the Global South. Denyer Willis's work interrogates these questions primarily from Brazil, a country long intertwined with the expansion of capitalism, inequality and racial order, but also in the global capillaries of Silicon Valley.
He has published two books, The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil (2015) and Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (2022), both published by the University of California Press.
When
Location
Anthropology Department, Room 51-A, Stanford
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