Keep the Bones Alive - Book Talk with Graham Denyer Willis

Date
Thu March 16th - Fri March 17th 2023, All day
Event Sponsor
Stanford Global Studies, Department of Anthropology, Concerning Violence
Location
On Thursday, March 16 at 12:00 noon Pacific in Building 260 (Pigott Hall, DLCL), room 252; On Friday, March 17 at 3:00pm in Building 50 (Anthropology), Room 51-A

Join us on Thursday, March 16 at 12:00 noon Pacific in Building 260 (Pigott Hall, DLCL), room 252 and/or Friday, March 17 at 3:00pm in Building 50 (Anthropology), Room 51-A.

 
On Thursday, March 16, Denyer Willis will engage in dialogue around his newest book, Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (UC Press, 2022). This book engages gravediggers, mothers who are searching, prosecutors, the PCC, and even imprisoned police officers, among others, leading Denyer Willis to place these disappearances in conversation with a longue durée of racial capitalism and Brazilian state formation. Denyer Willis is keen to dialogue em torno do livro but also about similar problems and topics addressed in other attendees' work.
 
On Friday, March 17, Denyer Willis will be part of an open-ended conversation with others concerned with a world of global inequalities. This conversation would begin with an interrogation of why Brazil has built nearly 1,500 prisons in the last four decades, with a veritable explosion in more recent decades. Denyer Willis poses this "punitive development model" as a "prison consensus" and seeks to examine its effect on the social and political life since the end of the Cold War, asking who benefits and why.
 
Options for hybrid participation will be available.
 
About the speaker:
Graham Denyer Willis is Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Geography at Queens' College, Cambridge. Denyer Willis is a political ethnographer interested in practices and assumptions of power amidst inequality, who is especially motivated to identify and question forms of entrapment and escape from power and capitalism, particularly in cities of the Global South. Denyer Willis's work interrogates these questions primarily from Brazil, a country long intertwined with the expansion of capitalism, inequality and racial order, but also in the global capillaries of Silicon Valley.

He has published two books, The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil (2015) and Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (2022), both published by the University of California Press. For more information, visit his website.
 
--
 
This event is sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, through the Global Research workshop series "Law and Literature in the Global South," which aims to broaden the horizons of the Law and Humanities critical paradigm.