Writing, pleasure, and community: University pedagogical experiences in an Argentinean women’s prison

Abstract

The workshop ""Imagining what's next". Reflections upon genders and sexualities, writing and editorial practices", held by teachers of the Philosophy and Literature Faculty's Prison Outreach Program of the University of Buenos Aires, was an experience of re-entry and reconstruction of the pedagogical territory of the Ezeiza University Center of the IV Federal Penitentiary Complex, in Argentina, after the pandemic years' hardships. It is therefore worthwhile to observe, systematize and conceptualize the resources and strategies that teachers and students alike deployed as part of the process of re-engaging within the classroom. It is our purpose to contribute to the study on the literary, intimate, academic, political, and affective mechanisms that make up the field of pedagogical territories in prison. We approached several scenes and texts produced in this framework from the three disciplines that made up the workshop. We sought to explore the power of writing, editorial and pedagogical practices to counteract prison logics and create ways of repairing the damage inflicted on incarcerated persons. Thus, the community-building processes and the recourse to pleasure and desire as practices of resistance appear as guiding lines of the workshop we analyze in this paper.