Project description
Amplifying voices of prison communities
Prisons are everywhere in popular culture, yet the voices of incarcerated people are rarely heard. The ERC-funded WALLS2BRIDGES project explores how prisoners, their families and anti-prison activists use writing, images and sound to resist stigma and imagine alternative approaches to justice. Focusing on France, Türkiye, the UK and the United States, where mass incarceration profoundly shapes the lives of minority communities, the project studies media produced by those most directly affected by prison systems. It examines how people living under surveillance use media for self-expression, connection and participation, and asks whether media can support safer and fairer societies as a shared community resource rather than a tool of control.
Objective
Incarceration is widely depicted in films, TV, and the news, but prison communities—imprisoned people, their families, and anti-prison activists—are seldom recognized as media producers. Developing a transnational, collaborative, and comparative model of media justice, this project examines textual, visual, and sound media created by prison communities. It focuses on France, Turkey, the UK, and the US, where racial and ethnic discrimination stimulated mass incarceration of minorities from the mid-1960s, which marks the start of global mass incarceration and widescale prison revolts. The transhistorical and multimedia project attends to diverse prison environments and communities and their differential access to media.
This study is grounded in three topics fundamental to media, its place in society, and its function in human relations today: media and surveillance, media and the senses, and media and justice. The research questions it addresses are: a) What are the subversive uses of media by people who commonly experience them as tools of surveillance? b) How does the experience of imprisonment impact different sensory strategies and engagements with media? c) How can media provide a space of safety and justice for underprivileged communities?
WALLS2BRIDGES is groundbreaking in three ways. Theoretically, by bringing together media, literature and art studies, criminology, and racial and ethnic studies, it is innovative in approaching prison communities as media producers who resist stigmatization and marginalization. Methodologically, by integrating multimethod research (archival research, epistolary ethnography, fieldwork, media design, netnography, textual and audiovisual analysis), it maps historical and multimedia strategies for marginalized self-expression. Substantially, by opening a debate on media justice for communities in oppressive environments it engages in broader debates on social inclusion and equality.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium
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