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Sofie Fingado

Doctoral Fellow

 

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

 

consulting hours
by appointment only

Dissertation Project

Entanglements and Minor Cosmopolitan Practices of doing kinship. Resources of Survival in the Testimonies of the US Prison and Detention Complex

If the cosmopolitan project was and is highly dependent on (bodily) mobility, how are we to make sense of modes of incarceration and detention that restrict precisely this bodily and spatial mobility? In my PhD project, I will focus on the democratically legitimized and highly intertwined spaces of confinement that are the detention camps of the “War on Terror,” of the prison industrial complex within US borders, and of the US border regime. Drawing upon the testimonies of those confined, I want to propose a reading that situates the emergence of minor cosmopolitanisms within acts of resistance that oppose (violent) practices of separation and isolation. Through kinship association and through addressing those on the outside, these practices not only transcend material carceral borders but also insist on the irreducible entanglement of their subjects. I propose to read these practices of “doing kinship” (Butler) and entanglement as “resources of survival” (Hartman), in their (prison) abolitionist potentiality, and as inventive practices of minor cosmopolitanisms that call into question the very notions of freedom, mobility, and separability that lay ground for the cosmopolitan project in the singular.

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.