Dr Francesca Esposito (University of Westminster and Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford).

The talk will examine immigration detention in Italy and Portugal by looking at women’s lived experiences of confinement. The empirical data — comprising participant observations, informal conversations, and interviews — are analysed through a feminist intersectional lens. This approach illuminates constructions of gender and sexuality in their mutual and contextualised articulation with other power relations (i.e., processes of racialisation and ethnicisation stemming from colonial histories) as well as the reconfiguration of these constructions by women themselves. Doing so, my analysis also focuses on the entanglement between power and resistance in daily life in immigration detention centres.