Event

Join us for a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation about incarceration, policing, and the practice of law in a variety of Middle Eastern settings.

Hayal Akarsu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Previously, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and Lecturer in Anthropology at Brandeis University. Her recent research project, an ethnography of police reforms in Turkey, has yielded publications in American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, Society and Space, and Exertions. Her book manuscript, Force Experts: Afterlives of Police Reforms in Turkey, explores the connections between policing, human rights, transnational flows and governance, and lived experiences of security and insecurity in the Middle East and beyond. 

Heba Khalil is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Nebraska Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of York. Her book project, “Lawyers of Egypt: Class, Precarity and Politics,” explores the rising precarity of Egyptian lawyers and their shifting relationships to politics and society. 

Shai Gortler is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of London, SOAS, and earned his P.hD. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota, where his research focused on the intersection of political theory, theories of subjectivity and the philosophy of punishment. His book project, "Carceral Subjectivity and the Exercise of Freedom in Israel-Palestine", looks at modalities of subject formation at work in the Israeli incarceration of Palestinian political prisoners.

Emily Sutcliffe directs the Toll Public Interest Center at Penn Law, where she has led and developed a range of public service programs and the law school's pro bono requirement. She teaches the course "Power, Injustice & Change in America" at Penn Law and is a a lecturer at Penn's School of Social Policy and Practice. She has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, and trained human rights attorneys and activists in Malaysia, Zambia and Burkina Faso. She currently sits on the board of Justice at Work (JAW) and was a founding board member of the Youth Sentencing & Re-Entry Project (YSRP). 

 Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology