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Please find below details of the next lecture in the Culture Wars lecture series on censorship and freedom of speech, by Faye Claridge from the Department of Sociology. The lecture will take place on Monday 20 October, 11am-12pm, in MS.04 (Zeeman Building).  

The full schedule of talks for the Culture Wars series is available here:

Incarcerated and invisible? Enforced anonymity for imprisoned creatives

Faye Claridge

Enforcing anonymity on outputs from prison creative programmes in the UK is standard practice. Scholars have stated that invisibility and violent erasure can be deliberate tactics in the criminal justice system, an ideology that is realised in governance (such as the 2024 Prison Media Bill) and in prison locations and architecture. However, the institutionally desirable invisibility of people in prison is in tension with one of the key founding concepts of punishment; deterrence. My emerging research suggests the intrinsically visual qualities of visual art render the field peculiarly appropriate for exploring practices and contradictions of social exclusion in punishment and its individual and societal impacts. My examination of hand-made works, containing discernible human traces, provides opportunity to consider forms of embodied humanity and the ways in which these can assert existence. Combining elements from Philosophy of Arts with Sociology in my research, it is also useful to reflect on the act of engagement with visual artworks as a cooperative undertaking, bridging distance between artwork and viewer. In the context of prison, this collaborative act offers distinct possibilities for sporadic cohesion in a system built on social inequality, dehumanisation and separation.

Best wishes,

Dr Steve Purcell

Director of Research, English and Comparative Literary Studies

Week 3 (20 Oct. 2025) David Bather Woods 

'Sailing to Byzantium (via Liverpool): Irish literature as a journey home' [Yeats at Poetry Foundation]]