BOONE - On October 5th, Dr. Jon Carter, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, traveled to Cornell University to participate in the conference "Carceral Worlds and Human Rights Across the Americas", organized by the Department of Anthropology at Cornell and the Stanford Human Rights Center at the Stanford School of Law.
The conference aims to pair the legal expertise in international human rights law and activism, with the extensive experience of "prison ethnographers" who have spent significant amounts of time inside of prison wards across the Americas.
Dr. Carter will give an invited lecture on his ethnographic fieldwork in the national penitentiary system of Honduras, spanning ten years.
Carter's work in Honduras narrates the history of the current prison crisis wherein the vast majority of prison wards are designated "ungovernable" by formal authorities. His work describes the informal dynamics of prison administration, where inmates themselves run the inside of the prison system, engineering a variety of mechanisms to create livable spaces where the federal government has neglected to maintain basic standards of living.
The conference at Cornell University is the first meeting of a larger collaborative project between ethnographers and legal scholars that will expand the comparative studies of incarceration and penal practices across the hemisphere.
Dr. Carter will give a similar lecture at Appalachian State University, October 12 at 12:00pm in Anne Belk 336 to discuss his work and the work of this Cornell/Stanford group.