[URBANTH-L]WORKING CONFERENCE ON THE PENAL STATE

[Kevin Gerard Karpiak]

WORKING CONFERENCE ON THE PENAL STATE
  
Organized by
Loïc Wacquant (Univ. of California-Berkeley) and Bruce Western (Princeton University)
  
21-22 April 2006 (provisional date, to be confirmed)
Blumer Room, 210 Barrows Hall, Deparment of Sociology
University of California-Berkeley
  

With the support of the Sociology Department and Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, Boalt 
Law School, UC-Berkeley; Princeton University; and the Russell Sage Foundation
  
This Working Conference aims to give doctoral researchers working on crime/justice/control an 
opportunity to gather collective steam and strength, and to put the “penal state” squarely on the 
intellectual map by creating firmer linkages between scholarship on crime/deviance, police, 
courts, corrections and their ramifications, on the one hand, and political, economic, and 
cultural sociology, on the other. The conference will be patterned after the “Putting Pierre 
Bourdieu to Work” conference held at UCB in Spring 2005: papers and abstracts will circulate a 
month before the event; each thematic session will open with a faculty presentation, followed by 3 
presentations by doctoral scholars, and general discussion. Plans for possible publication include 
a collective volume or a series of papers for Punishment and Society.

If you are doing research on these topics and would be interested to participate, please send a 
short note with: 1-your name, discipline, and institution; 2-a working title and provisional 
abstract for your presentation, 3-a short abstract of your dissertation research, to:
Loïc Wacquant at UC-Berkeley: <loic at uclink4.berkeley.edu> or
Bruce Western at Princeton:  <western at opr.princeton.edu>
  
Faculty participants (provisional):
  
Katherine Beckett (Sociology, University of Washington-Seattle)
Malcolm Feeley (Boalt Law School, UC-Berkeley)
Rucker Johnson (Public Policy School, UC-Berkeley)
Jonathan Simon (Boalt Law School, UC-Berkeley)
Peter Spierenburg (Erasmus University, Rotterdam)
Loïc Wacquant (Sociology, UC-Berkeley and Centre de sociologie européenne)
Bruce Western (Sociology, Princeton)
Franklin Zimring (Boalt Law School, UC-Berkeley)
  
Doctoral participants (partial list):
  
Kelly BRYANT (Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC-Berkeley): Dissecting California v. Johnson: A 
Cultural Analysis of Prison Desegregation Litigation
  
Linda COCO (Medical Anthropology, UC-Berkeley): Crawling from Under Debt: Attorneys and their 
Clients in Debt Court
  
John EASON (Sociology, University of Chicago): Development by Arrest: On the Growth of the Penal 
System in Rural America
  
Alice GOFFMAN (Sociology, Princeton University): On the Run: The Social Situation of Wanted 
Persons
  
Josh GUETZKOW (Robert Wood Johnson Fellow): A New Day in Court? The San Francisco Drug Courts in 
Action
  
Kevin Gerard KARPIAK (Anthropology, UC-Berkeley) – Implementing Police Reform in Sarkozy’s France
  
Brian LANDE (Sociology, UC-Berkeley) - The Fabrication of Cops
  
Chrysanthi LEON (Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC-Berkeley): Sex Offenders and State Power in 
Fin-de-Siècle America
  
Alexandra MURPHY (Sociology, Princeton University): Policing Ourselves: Law and Order in the 
Contemporary American Ghetto
  
Josh PAGE (Sociology, UC-Berkeley) – Tangled Relationships: Prisoner Guards, Crime Victims, and 
the Media in California
  
Gretchen PURSER (Sociology, UC-Berkeley) - Cheap Work: The Recruitment of Parolees in the 
Day-Labor Industry
  
Traci SCHLESINGER (Sociology, Princeton University): The Failure of Race-Neutral Policies: How 
Changes in Sentencing Blackened the US Prison
  
Mark TONEY (Sociology, UC-Berkeley) – Birth of  a Movement? Activists Mobilizing for the Rights of 
Ex-Felons
  
Chris WILDEMAN (Sociology, Princeton University): The Impact of Parental Incarceration on 
Children’s Living Situations


Kevin G. Karpiak
Dept. of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley