Sofie Fingado
Doctoral Fellow
Dissertation Project
Narrations from the Carceral Margins
Entanglements and Carceral Relations in the U.S. Prison and Detention Complex
My PhD project is concerned with relations and relationality within the U.S. prison industrial and globalized detention complex as it emerged after 9/11. It takes into account both the relations between (national) imprisonment and (global) “War on Terror” detention and argues that they can be understood in their links to one another, and with an emphasis on the relations that incarcerated people hold to the outside.
I am interested in how carcerality expands beyond its physical enclosures and affects what I propose to call “carceral margins,” spaces affected heavily by carcerality, by prison industry and by global detention. My project will thus make a case for relation with regard to the civilian spaces not designated carceral: Carcerality as a logic and as violence cannot be contained within carceral walls but spreads and expands into the domestic, the private, and wider society. This rests on the assumption that people are not existing as individuals but as socially bound and entangled beings. It is via these entanglements that carcerality cannot be contained in or reduced to enclosed prisons/camps. Democratically legitimized “individual punishment” as well as “targeted warfare” are, so I argue, concepts run obsolete by an emphasis on carceral relations.
The project understands “kites” – messages, notes, letters, thoughts, prayers, or wishes – that travel through and beyond carceral walls as manifestations of these relations. In their textual or oral form, the project will attempt to center these kites as encompassing a multitude of relations and tend to these different modalities of relation.
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.
Since 2022, I am a doctoral fellow with the IRTG minor cosmopolitanisms at the Universities of Potsdam and Melbourne where I spent the summer term of 2024.
Research Interests
- Gender/Queer Studies
- Postcolonial/Decolonial Studies
- Resistance Studies
- Prison/Detention Literature
- Alt-Right Movements
Publications
Fingado, Sofie / Isak, Waldemar: “Nicht-Wollen und die Zwischenräume der Ausrede,” in: Därmann, Iris / Fingado, Sofie / Gehrlach, Andreas / Isak, Waldemar (eds): Gegenkräfte, Gegenkünste. Widerspenstige Perspektiven der kulturwissenschaftlichen Ästhetik. (forthcoming)
Angene, Sven / Buscot, Camille / Fingado, Sofie / Janssen, Neela / Machein, Miriam / Mothes, Undine / Wagener, Ulrike / Wilby, Jonathan: Einführung in das kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten. Eine Handreichung. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 2025.
Fingado, Sofie. “Leben geben, giving birth. Schwangerschaftsabbruch und unbedingter Empfang,” in: Absalon et al. (eds): Empfangen. Die andere Seite der Gabe. Berlin: de Gruyter 2023:65–72.
Fingado, Sofie. “’[…] 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.
Fingado, Sofie. 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.
Presentations
“Carceral Relations. Tending to a haunted counter-carceral archive” . Presentation at the conference Archiving America/American Archives of the German Association of American Studies (GAAS), University of Siegen, June 2025.
“Prison Zines”. Guest lecture at the B.A. seminar Zine Cultures. Zwischen Theorie, Kunst und Aktivismus, taught by Waldemar Isak and Marie Klinger, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Universität der Künste (UdK) , June 2025.
“Collective Reading as Intervention. On Fascism and Alt-Right Literature(s)”. Panel host and organizer at the conference A Minor Cosmopolitan Intervention, University of Potsdam, Humboldt-University, Freie Universität, hosted at Spore Initiative, May 2025.
“Interrelated Bodies in the Peripheries of Captivity”. Presentation at the conference Embodied Histories of the International Society for Cultural History (ISCH), University of Potsdam, September 2024.
“Thinking Infrastructural Relations. The Case against Exceptionality in the U.S. Prison and Detention Complex after 9/11”. Presentation at the conference Postcolonial Infrastructure of the German Association of Postcolonial Studies (GAPS), University of Konstanz, May 2023.
“‘Let’s Make These Prison Walls Quake And Tumble Until They All Fall Down.’ Politisches Schreiben und Abolitionistische Gefängnispolitiken”. Guest lecture for the lecture series Kulturwissenschaftliche Ästhetik, Humboldt-University of Berlin, May 2023.
“Guantánamo Bay and its Territorial Legacies”. Guest lecture at the M.A. seminar American Territorialities, taught by Prof. Dr. Nicole Waller, University of Potsdam, February 2023.