Andrew M Jefferson
Biographic Data
| ID | 144482 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew M Jefferson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew M |
| FAMILY NAME | Jefferson |
| SIGNATURE | JEFFERSON A M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Danish Institute against Torture |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2155-2309 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The palpability of justice
This article explores how we might imagine, discover, and rehearse a ‘lived sense of justice’. It moves beyond insisting that law and justice are distinct, positing the promise of justice-in-the-making as a necessary counterpoint to notions of justice tied only to law, legality, and punishment. The article gestures towards the humanities – to poetry, the arts, literature – as a potential antidote to contemporary political and criminological parad…
The Prison and the Revolution in Myanmar: Exploring Prison Protests During a Revolutionary Situation
What role do prison protests play in revolutions? This article examines the prison protests that have occurred since the military coup, situating them as integral and instructive elements of an unfolding revolutionary situation. The analysis explores the character and significance of such protests at a moment of fierce and violent political contestation. It documents and contextualises them and develops an argument about their contemporary signif…
Penal duress in (post)colonial Myanmar
This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis of martial, penal practice in Myanmar. We examine prison labour and pone-san (a demeaning, defamatory and coercive control of prisoners’ bodies) to show how these two enduring practices of domination, subjection and constraint – understood, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations of duress – animate penal practice in powerful, productive and problematic wa…
Prison reform and torture prevention under ‘compromised circumstances’
In this article, drawing on two decades studying prisons and prison reform practices in (mostly) southern countries undergoing transition, I examine the challenges facing anti-torture professionals and prison reformers working in the global south and critically interrogate the assumptions of dominant models of reform. Rights and health-based entry points to the prevention of torture and inhumane treatment and prison reform are argued to be necess…
Amplified Vulnerabilities and Reconfigured Relations: Covid-19, Torture Prevention and Human Rights in the Global South
The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured personal, organisational and political landscapes in quite radical ways. This paper reflects on the differentiated impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and responses to it. We unpack some of the effects of the crisis on populations already subject to harassment, persecution and deprivation due to their marginal position in society or their resistance to state power. We illuminate how the current crisis is much mo…
Book Forum
Working with Veena Das's Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropology after Wittgenstein By Lotte Buch SegalRepairing the World: Ordinary Ethics and the Shadows of Moralism By Emilija ZabiliūtėThe Text's Texture By Marco MottaThe Residues of Kinship By Resto CruzUncertain Relations with People, Practice, and Ethnographic Knowledge By Andrew M. JeffersonThe Moon Shadows: When Arguments Rest By Veena Das
Danielle Celermajer, The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach
Connecting and Disconnection
Drawing on a case study carried out in Myanmar, this article elaborates on the concept of connectivity as a rich and critical articulation of the way prisoners and their relatives develop and sustain relationships during incarceration. The notion of connectivity offers an alternative analytic frame to that provided by established notions of prisoner-family contact. Drawing primarily on interview data, we examine how people connect and disconnect …
Prison Ethnography in Africa: Reflections on a Maturing Field
On peut aujourd'hui affirmer que les études sur les prisons dans les pays du Sud sont arrivées à maturité. Dans cet article, nous nous appuyons sur près de vingt années de recherches ethnographiques sur les prisons « au-delà de l'Occident » pour analyser ce processus de maturation. Il n'est plus possible de considérer que les prisons africaines n'ont pas été soumises au regard empirique des sciences sociales ou que tout ce que nous savons sur le …
Concealment and revelation as bureaucratic and ethnographic practice: Lessons from Tunisian prisons
Drawing on preparatory work for a study of prison life in Tunisia, this article explores the twin practices of concealing and revealing that are common features of bureaucratic and ethnographic practice. Insights from the anthropology of bureaucracy and secrecy are brought into conversation with the experience of prison ethnographers (seasoned and novice) to illuminate the way prisons as peculiar sites of rule-based domination call for a particul…
The Confines of Time - On the Ebbing Away of Futures in Sierra Leone and Palestine
This article contributes to an understanding of the existential character of confinement by directing attention to the interlinked concepts of tiredness and foreboding. Through juxtaposition and analysis of material gathered among people whose lives are lived under compromised circumstances in Sierra Leone and Palestine we illuminate the way time - not only space - confines. Our analytical concern is with the way in which futures are anticipated …
Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement
This Introduction to the special issue develops a theoretical argument around the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement by exploring the relationships between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and the like with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape. We explore how life is lived in and across these sites of …
Health provision and health professional roles under compromised circumstances: Lessons from Sierra Leone’s prisons
This article adds to a growing body of empirical work on prisons in the global south. It reports on a survey into prison health provision in Sierra Leone, West Africa conducted by a local non-governmental organization (Prison Watch – Sierra Leone). Taking the survey results as the point of departure and engaging with the limited literature on prison health provision in the South we discuss the role of health professionals in preventing violence i…
Human Rights in Prisons: Comparing Institutional Encounters in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and the Philippines
Drawing on participatory action research conducted in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and the Philippines, Human Rights in Prisons analyses encounters between rights-based non-governmental organisations and prisons. It explores the previously under-researched perspectives of prison staff and prisoners on their lives and relationships
Human Rights in Prisons
Drawing on participatory action research conducted in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and the Philippines, Human Rights in Prisons analyses encounters between rights-based non-governmental organisations and pris
Sensing prison climates
In December 2010 members of the Global Prisons Research Network (GPRN) met for a seminar entitled "Dissecting the 'Non-Western' Prison." The articles showcased in this thematic section were first presented there. This introduction proposes the notion of "prison climate" as a useful way of rethinking variations and similarities across prisons. This notion directs attention away from the prison "as such" to the prison "as is" and points to the fact…
Conceptualizing confinement: Prisons and poverty in Sierra Leone
This article develops an expansive notion of confinement as a lens through which to think about the lives of former prisoners, former fighters and slum dwellers in a post-conflict setting characterized by political volatility, exorbitant poverty and limited opportunities. The theoretical purpose of the article is to explore whether an expansive notion of confinement might help us make sense of the lives of people whose possibilities are limited m…
Traversing sites of confinement: Post-prison survival in Sierra Leone
In February 2006 a group of over 50 former fighters were released from Freetown’s central prison after over six years’ incarceration. This article traces the ways they handled the move from one form of confinement to another and shows how everyday life for former combatant, ex-prisoners is fashioned according to contingent, unpredictable features of the post-war, post-prison landscape. These are mediated through worldviews that developed prior to…
State Violence and Human Rights: State Officials in the South
State Violence and Human Rights addresses how legal practices – rooted in global human rights discourse or local demands – take hold in societies where issues of state violence remain to be resolved. Attempts to make societies accountable to human rights norms regularly draw on international legal conventions governing state conduct. As such, interventions tend to be based on inherently normative assumptions about conflict, justice, rights and la…
(Re)Searching for Persons in Practice: Field-Based Methods for Critical Psychological Practice Research
This article explores the degree to which anthropological field work can contribute to constructively reconfigure approaches to the critical psychological study of persons in practice. We argue that a line of development within German/Danish critical psychological practice research ought to be consistent with a development of the critical psychological conception of subjects as persons in practice. Via an examination of anthropological notions of…
Prison officer training and practice in Nigeria: Contention, contradiction and re-imagining reform strategies
Prisons and prison guards in Africa remain understudied and ill understood and are most often represented in the literature as objects/subjects of critique or targets of reform. To begin to redress this balance, drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among prison officers in Nigeria, this article examines prison officer training and the penal philosophy and practice of the Nigerian Prisons Service. Documentation of the contra…
Reforming Nigerian Prisons
Journal Article Reforming Nigerian Prisons: Rehabilitating a 'Deviant' State Get access Andrew M. Jefferson Andrew M. Jefferson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 45, Issue 4, July 2005, Pages 487–503, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azi034 Published: 19 April 2005
Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement
This Introduction to the special issue develops a theoretical argument around the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement by exploring the relationships between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and the like with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape. We explore how life is lived in and across these sites of …
Sensing prison climates
In December 2010 members of the Global Prisons Research Network (GPRN) met for a seminar entitled "Dissecting the 'Non-Western' Prison." The articles showcased in this thematic section were first presented there. This introduction proposes the notion of "prison climate" as a useful way of rethinking variations and similarities across prisons. This notion directs attention away from the prison "as such" to the prison "as is" and points to the fact…
The Confines of Time - On the Ebbing Away of Futures in Sierra Leone and Palestine
This article contributes to an understanding of the existential character of confinement by directing attention to the interlinked concepts of tiredness and foreboding. Through juxtaposition and analysis of material gathered among people whose lives are lived under compromised circumstances in Sierra Leone and Palestine we illuminate the way time - not only space - confines. Our analytical concern is with the way in which futures are anticipated …
Conceptualizing confinement: Prisons and poverty in Sierra Leone
This article develops an expansive notion of confinement as a lens through which to think about the lives of former prisoners, former fighters and slum dwellers in a post-conflict setting characterized by political volatility, exorbitant poverty and limited opportunities. The theoretical purpose of the article is to explore whether an expansive notion of confinement might help us make sense of the lives of people whose possibilities are limited m…
Traversing sites of confinement: Post-prison survival in Sierra Leone
In February 2006 a group of over 50 former fighters were released from Freetown’s central prison after over six years’ incarceration. This article traces the ways they handled the move from one form of confinement to another and shows how everyday life for former combatant, ex-prisoners is fashioned according to contingent, unpredictable features of the post-war, post-prison landscape. These are mediated through worldviews that developed prior to…
Prison officer training and practice in Nigeria: Contention, contradiction and re-imagining reform strategies
Prisons and prison guards in Africa remain understudied and ill understood and are most often represented in the literature as objects/subjects of critique or targets of reform. To begin to redress this balance, drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among prison officers in Nigeria, this article examines prison officer training and the penal philosophy and practice of the Nigerian Prisons Service. Documentation of the contra…
Concealment and revelation as bureaucratic and ethnographic practice: Lessons from Tunisian prisons
Drawing on preparatory work for a study of prison life in Tunisia, this article explores the twin practices of concealing and revealing that are common features of bureaucratic and ethnographic practice. Insights from the anthropology of bureaucracy and secrecy are brought into conversation with the experience of prison ethnographers (seasoned and novice) to illuminate the way prisons as peculiar sites of rule-based domination call for a particul…
(Re)Searching for Persons in Practice: Field-Based Methods for Critical Psychological Practice Research
This article explores the degree to which anthropological field work can contribute to constructively reconfigure approaches to the critical psychological study of persons in practice. We argue that a line of development within German/Danish critical psychological practice research ought to be consistent with a development of the critical psychological conception of subjects as persons in practice. Via an examination of anthropological notions of…
The Prison and the Revolution in Myanmar: Exploring Prison Protests During a Revolutionary Situation
What role do prison protests play in revolutions? This article examines the prison protests that have occurred since the military coup, situating them as integral and instructive elements of an unfolding revolutionary situation. The analysis explores the character and significance of such protests at a moment of fierce and violent political contestation. It documents and contextualises them and develops an argument about their contemporary signif…
Prison reform and torture prevention under ‘compromised circumstances’
In this article, drawing on two decades studying prisons and prison reform practices in (mostly) southern countries undergoing transition, I examine the challenges facing anti-torture professionals and prison reformers working in the global south and critically interrogate the assumptions of dominant models of reform. Rights and health-based entry points to the prevention of torture and inhumane treatment and prison reform are argued to be necess…
Prison Ethnography in Africa: Reflections on a Maturing Field
On peut aujourd'hui affirmer que les études sur les prisons dans les pays du Sud sont arrivées à maturité. Dans cet article, nous nous appuyons sur près de vingt années de recherches ethnographiques sur les prisons « au-delà de l'Occident » pour analyser ce processus de maturation. Il n'est plus possible de considérer que les prisons africaines n'ont pas été soumises au regard empirique des sciences sociales ou que tout ce que nous savons sur le …
Penal duress in (post)colonial Myanmar
This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis of martial, penal practice in Myanmar. We examine prison labour and pone-san (a demeaning, defamatory and coercive control of prisoners’ bodies) to show how these two enduring practices of domination, subjection and constraint – understood, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations of duress – animate penal practice in powerful, productive and problematic wa…
Book Forum
Working with Veena Das's Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropology after Wittgenstein By Lotte Buch SegalRepairing the World: Ordinary Ethics and the Shadows of Moralism By Emilija ZabiliūtėThe Text's Texture By Marco MottaThe Residues of Kinship By Resto CruzUncertain Relations with People, Practice, and Ethnographic Knowledge By Andrew M. JeffersonThe Moon Shadows: When Arguments Rest By Veena Das
Health provision and health professional roles under compromised circumstances: Lessons from Sierra Leone’s prisons
This article adds to a growing body of empirical work on prisons in the global south. It reports on a survey into prison health provision in Sierra Leone, West Africa conducted by a local non-governmental organization (Prison Watch – Sierra Leone). Taking the survey results as the point of departure and engaging with the limited literature on prison health provision in the South we discuss the role of health professionals in preventing violence i…
Reforming Nigerian Prisons
Journal Article Reforming Nigerian Prisons: Rehabilitating a 'Deviant' State Get access Andrew M. Jefferson Andrew M. Jefferson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 45, Issue 4, July 2005, Pages 487–503, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azi034 Published: 19 April 2005
Prison officer training and practice in Nigeria: Contention, contradiction and re-imagining reform strategies
Prisons and prison guards in Africa remain understudied and ill understood and are most often represented in the literature as objects/subjects of critique or targets of reform. To begin to redress this balance, drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among prison officers in Nigeria, this article examines prison officer training and the penal philosophy and practice of the Nigerian Prisons Service. Documentation of the contra…
State Violence and Human Rights: State Officials in the South
State Violence and Human Rights addresses how legal practices – rooted in global human rights discourse or local demands – take hold in societies where issues of state violence remain to be resolved. Attempts to make societies accountable to human rights norms regularly draw on international legal conventions governing state conduct. As such, interventions tend to be based on inherently normative assumptions about conflict, justice, rights and la…
(Re)Searching for Persons in Practice: Field-Based Methods for Critical Psychological Practice Research
This article explores the degree to which anthropological field work can contribute to constructively reconfigure approaches to the critical psychological study of persons in practice. We argue that a line of development within German/Danish critical psychological practice research ought to be consistent with a development of the critical psychological conception of subjects as persons in practice. Via an examination of anthropological notions of…
Traversing sites of confinement: Post-prison survival in Sierra Leone
In February 2006 a group of over 50 former fighters were released from Freetown’s central prison after over six years’ incarceration. This article traces the ways they handled the move from one form of confinement to another and shows how everyday life for former combatant, ex-prisoners is fashioned according to contingent, unpredictable features of the post-war, post-prison landscape. These are mediated through worldviews that developed prior to…
Conceptualizing confinement: Prisons and poverty in Sierra Leone
This article develops an expansive notion of confinement as a lens through which to think about the lives of former prisoners, former fighters and slum dwellers in a post-conflict setting characterized by political volatility, exorbitant poverty and limited opportunities. The theoretical purpose of the article is to explore whether an expansive notion of confinement might help us make sense of the lives of people whose possibilities are limited m…
Sensing prison climates
In December 2010 members of the Global Prisons Research Network (GPRN) met for a seminar entitled "Dissecting the 'Non-Western' Prison." The articles showcased in this thematic section were first presented there. This introduction proposes the notion of "prison climate" as a useful way of rethinking variations and similarities across prisons. This notion directs attention away from the prison "as such" to the prison "as is" and points to the fact…
Human Rights in Prisons: Comparing Institutional Encounters in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and the Philippines
Drawing on participatory action research conducted in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and the Philippines, Human Rights in Prisons analyses encounters between rights-based non-governmental organisations and prisons. It explores the previously under-researched perspectives of prison staff and prisoners on their lives and relationships
Human Rights in Prisons
Drawing on participatory action research conducted in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and the Philippines, Human Rights in Prisons analyses encounters between rights-based non-governmental organisations and pris
Health provision and health professional roles under compromised circumstances: Lessons from Sierra Leone’s prisons
This article adds to a growing body of empirical work on prisons in the global south. It reports on a survey into prison health provision in Sierra Leone, West Africa conducted by a local non-governmental organization (Prison Watch – Sierra Leone). Taking the survey results as the point of departure and engaging with the limited literature on prison health provision in the South we discuss the role of health professionals in preventing violence i…
Concealment and revelation as bureaucratic and ethnographic practice: Lessons from Tunisian prisons
Drawing on preparatory work for a study of prison life in Tunisia, this article explores the twin practices of concealing and revealing that are common features of bureaucratic and ethnographic practice. Insights from the anthropology of bureaucracy and secrecy are brought into conversation with the experience of prison ethnographers (seasoned and novice) to illuminate the way prisons as peculiar sites of rule-based domination call for a particul…
The Confines of Time - On the Ebbing Away of Futures in Sierra Leone and Palestine
This article contributes to an understanding of the existential character of confinement by directing attention to the interlinked concepts of tiredness and foreboding. Through juxtaposition and analysis of material gathered among people whose lives are lived under compromised circumstances in Sierra Leone and Palestine we illuminate the way time - not only space - confines. Our analytical concern is with the way in which futures are anticipated …
Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement
This Introduction to the special issue develops a theoretical argument around the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement by exploring the relationships between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and the like with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape. We explore how life is lived in and across these sites of …
Danielle Celermajer, The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach
Connecting and Disconnection
Drawing on a case study carried out in Myanmar, this article elaborates on the concept of connectivity as a rich and critical articulation of the way prisoners and their relatives develop and sustain relationships during incarceration. The notion of connectivity offers an alternative analytic frame to that provided by established notions of prisoner-family contact. Drawing primarily on interview data, we examine how people connect and disconnect …
Prison Ethnography in Africa: Reflections on a Maturing Field
On peut aujourd'hui affirmer que les études sur les prisons dans les pays du Sud sont arrivées à maturité. Dans cet article, nous nous appuyons sur près de vingt années de recherches ethnographiques sur les prisons « au-delà de l'Occident » pour analyser ce processus de maturation. Il n'est plus possible de considérer que les prisons africaines n'ont pas été soumises au regard empirique des sciences sociales ou que tout ce que nous savons sur le …
Amplified Vulnerabilities and Reconfigured Relations: Covid-19, Torture Prevention and Human Rights in the Global South
The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured personal, organisational and political landscapes in quite radical ways. This paper reflects on the differentiated impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and responses to it. We unpack some of the effects of the crisis on populations already subject to harassment, persecution and deprivation due to their marginal position in society or their resistance to state power. We illuminate how the current crisis is much mo…
Book Forum
Working with Veena Das's Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropology after Wittgenstein By Lotte Buch SegalRepairing the World: Ordinary Ethics and the Shadows of Moralism By Emilija ZabiliūtėThe Text's Texture By Marco MottaThe Residues of Kinship By Resto CruzUncertain Relations with People, Practice, and Ethnographic Knowledge By Andrew M. JeffersonThe Moon Shadows: When Arguments Rest By Veena Das
Prison reform and torture prevention under ‘compromised circumstances’
In this article, drawing on two decades studying prisons and prison reform practices in (mostly) southern countries undergoing transition, I examine the challenges facing anti-torture professionals and prison reformers working in the global south and critically interrogate the assumptions of dominant models of reform. Rights and health-based entry points to the prevention of torture and inhumane treatment and prison reform are argued to be necess…
Penal duress in (post)colonial Myanmar
This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis of martial, penal practice in Myanmar. We examine prison labour and pone-san (a demeaning, defamatory and coercive control of prisoners’ bodies) to show how these two enduring practices of domination, subjection and constraint – understood, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations of duress – animate penal practice in powerful, productive and problematic wa…
The Prison and the Revolution in Myanmar: Exploring Prison Protests During a Revolutionary Situation
What role do prison protests play in revolutions? This article examines the prison protests that have occurred since the military coup, situating them as integral and instructive elements of an unfolding revolutionary situation. The analysis explores the character and significance of such protests at a moment of fierce and violent political contestation. It documents and contextualises them and develops an argument about their contemporary signif…
The palpability of justice
This article explores how we might imagine, discover, and rehearse a ‘lived sense of justice’. It moves beyond insisting that law and justice are distinct, positing the promise of justice-in-the-making as a necessary counterpoint to notions of justice tied only to law, legality, and punishment. The article gestures towards the humanities – to poetry, the arts, literature – as a potential antidote to contemporary political and criminological parad…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Criminology (13 works) · Prison (12 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Human rights (8 works) · Politics (6 works) · Sierra leone (6 works)