Overview

How do foreigners take care of their children when they give birth while serving a prison sentence? How do these women nurture their family ties when separated by two, four, five years or more across prisons and transnational borders? These issues are the boarding gate for the seminar that will address women detainees and prison processes based on the maternal and family modulation of foreigners imprisoned in São Paulo. Based on the multisite field work (Marcus, 1995), resulting from my political engagement with the Land and Labour Institute (ITTC) and other civil rights organizations, I intend to analyse the implications of imprisonment in the practice of maternal and family care, and vice versa, based on the experience of giving birth as well as on relating to the children and other relatives residing in the country of origin during the sentence. More precisely, I am faced with the challenge of analysing two coexisting and concomitant processes: the intervention of imprisonment in the maintenance of maternal and family ties and, on the contrary, the intervention of such ties in updating prison boundaries. Two processes that help us to think of an anthropology that observes people and their environments from their metastable nature, in an ongoing learning process. 

Programme:
Introduction - Teresa Cunha (CES)
Presentation - Bruna Brumachar
Concluding comments- Teresa Cunha

Bio note

Bruna Bumachar is an anthropologist and has been working in the prison system since 2006 as a member of civil human rights organisations. She holds a degree in Tourism from the University Centre of Vila Velha (2002) and a degree in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo (2007), with an exchange at the State University of Campinas (2004-2005) in Brazil and Eduardo Mondlane University (2005- 2006), in Mozambique. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the State University of Campinas (2016) at the PAGU Gender Studies Centre, under supervision of Adriana Gracia Piscitelli, with exchange internships at University of Southern California (2012), under supervision of Rhacel Parreñas, and University of Minho (2014), under  supervision of Manuela Ivone da Cunha. Currently, Bruna works as a project and research advisor at the Instituto Terra Trabalho e Cidadania (ITTC, 2017-2018), a human rights organisation that works in the criminal justice system. And, in partnership with the Public Defender of the Union, she is conducting postdoctoral studies at the University of São Paulo (USP) under supervision of Vera Telles and with FAPESP funding. Her areas of interest include: prisons, migration, gender, technology, law, transnationality and kinship.