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Sofie Fingado

Doctoral Fellow

 

Campus Am Neuen Palais
Am Neuen Palais 10
Building 1, Room 0.15
14469 Potsdam
Germany

 

Sprechzeiten
by appointment only

Dissertation Project

Entanglements in the U.S. Prison and Detention Complex. Resources of Survival and Abolitionist Horizons in Practices of (Kin) Relating 

My PhD project takes into view the carceral spaces of “War on Terror” detention, of the prison industrial complex, and of the U.S. border regime. While these spaces of confinement are to be described in their very own (cultural, historical) specificity, they come into view as highly intertwined spaces in their dependency of epistemic and infrastructural transfers that circulate between different historical and spatial sites. Insisting on these relations aims at countering claims of “exceptionality,” isolated incidents and singular perpetrators, and makes a case for a more systemic analysis of the violence encountered. At the same time, the project aims at expanding this attention to relationalities by taking into view carceral violence of separation and isolation which seeks to interrupt relations and entanglements on yet another level. The project will read texts and testimonies emerging from these carceral spaces for an analysis of precisely this separating violence on the one hand, while on the other hand considering them as “kites” transcending isolating borders and (re)establishing relations. Insisting on the irreducible entanglement of their subjects, the project will focus on narrations and modalities of (kin) relating as resources of survival in their (prison) abolitionist potentiality and as inventive practices of living/together.


Biography

I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Cultural History and Theory as well as Social Sciences at Humboldt-University and its partner institution Tel Aviv University. I then continued my MA studies in Cultural History and Theory, with a semester abroad at the University of Copenhagen, which I completed in February 2022 with my thesis “Troubled Masculinities at Guantánamo Bay. Distant Relatives and the Peripheries of the ‘Global War on Terror’”.

Since then I have received a scholarship by the Humboldt Graduate School and have worked at FAU with the RTG “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics”. During my studies, I have worked as a student assistant at the chair for Kulturwissenschaftliche Ästhetik und Kulturtheorie and had the privilege of teaching an introductory course to Cultural History and Theory over the course of several years.


Research Interests

  • Gender/Queer Studies
  • Postcolonial/Decolonial Studies
  • Resistance Studies
  • Prison/Detention Literature
  • Alt-Right Movements

Publications

With Waldemar Isak: “Nicht-Wollen und die Zwischenräume der Ausrede”, in: Iris Därmann / Andreas Gehrlach (Ed.): Widerstand und Ablehnung. Berlin: de Gruyter (in progress, publication in winter 2022).

“’[…] denn wer alles verliert, verliert auch leicht sich selbst’. Behältnisse des Überlebens bei Primo Levi”, **in: Laura Busse / Andreas Gehrlach / Waldemar Isak (Ed.): Selbstbehältnisse. Orte und Gegenstände der Aufbewahrung von Subjektivität. Berlin: Neofelis 2021, pp. 211–229.

Conference report “Selbstbehältnisse. Orte und Gegenstände der Aufbewahrung von Individualität”, 15.11.–16.11.2019 Berlin, H-Soz-Kult, 22.04.2020, www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-8728.