Open lecture with Tomas Max Martin and Andrew M. Jefferson (DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture)

Our presentation will focus on the background and rationale for our study of Legacies of Detention in Myanmar (2016-21) exploring why prisons are an ideal empirical and analytic site for generating knowledge about the changing relationship between state and citizen in Myanmar.  We will also share ethnographic insights from the project’s initial case study on prisoners’ contact with the outside world. Our paper proposes the concept of ‘connectivity’ as a more meaningful articulation of the way prisoners and their relatives in Myanmar make sense of their efforts to sustain relationships during incarceration. By examining how people connect in situations of chaos, control and surveillance; how they manage under circumstances of not-knowing; and how they develop and sustain caring and protecting connections, we illustrate the utility of the concept of connectivity particularly with reference to how it creates space for critical analysis of the societal and fundamentally relational practice of imprisonment.

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