Foucault News

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DePaul University Humanities Center & the Department of Philosophy

Foucault and the legacy of the prisons information group (GIP)

MAY 8th, 2015
Richardson Library 115
2350 N. Kenmore
Chicago, IL 60614

Scholars Symposium

1:00-1:10 Opening Remarks
Kevin Thompson, DePaul University

1:10-1:30 “The Dialectic of Theory and Practice”
Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University

1:30-1:50 “Prisoners Inside / Intellectuals Outside: The GIP and the French prison revolts (1971-2)”
Nicolas Drolc, Documentarian

1:50-2:10 “The Creaturely Politics of Prisoner Resistance Movements”
Lisa Guenther, Vanderbilt University

2:10-2:30 “The GIP and the Question of Failure”
Perry Zurn, DePaul University

2:30-3:00 Q & A

Film Screening

7:00-8:30 Sur les toits (2014, French with English Subtitles)

8:30-9:00 Q & A with Director Nicolas Drolc

SUR LES TOITS
(2014, French with English Subtitles)
Nicolas Drolc, Director

Between September 1971 and the end of 1972, for the very first time in French history, prison inmates collectively initiated revolts that led to a takeover of their prisons, to the occupying of prison roof tops, and to the direct communication of their demands to the public.

Now, forty years later, filmmaker Nicolas Drolc explores this forgotten page of social struggle. Through a mixture of archival footage and recordings and extensive interviews with the leaders of the revolt at Nancy, a prison warden from Toul, lawyer Henri Leclerc, sociologist and GIP co-founder Daniel Defert, as well as the ex-convict, writer, and political activist, Serge Livrozet, Sur les toits (On the roofs) paints a portrait of a time and a struggle whose legacy challenges us to confront in our own day the questions of imprisonment, punishment, and the diffusion of the carceral practices of control, surveillance, and normalization.

All events are free and open to the public.

Proceedings are forthcoming in a special issue of the Carceral Notebooks.