About the speaker
Trishna Senapaty is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Crime Law and Justice Studies at the University of Puget Sound. She has a PhD in anthropology from Cornell University. Her research examines the intersection of carceral institutions and the family in postcolonial India. She is the co-founder of the Abolitionist Anthropology Working Group - a mutually supportive community of anthropologists invested in diverse anti-carceral scholarly and social justice work.

About the event
This talk takes at its starting point conceptions of  rehabilitation surrounding the prison in a city in Rajasthan, India to critically reflect on the institution of the family. While prisoner rehabilitation is dominantly imagined as a return to the family, this return is fraught and difficult in practice due to the gendered stigma it brings to the family. However, rehabilitation when taken seriously as an ongoing and often informal practice spans many spaces both institutional and domestic where lives are sought to be rebuilt after confinement. Based on 2 years of ethnographic research with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, activists and institutional actors, this talk draws attention to three different sites: the closed prison, the open prison, and the office of a human rights' collective. In these spaces it examines and draws attention to the uneven and varied grounds on which ideas of home and belonging are negotiated and contested to generate alternate forms of community and care.