Hollis Moore

Biography

Hollis Moore is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis, entitled “Imprisonment and (Un)Relatedness in North Eastern Brazil”, examines how increasing rates of imprisonment, and the concentration of carceral effects, shape social relations in Mata Escura, a low-income neighbourhood in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. This study encompasses spaces such as prison waiting areas, a shelter/school for children of prisoners, prison visitors' homes, evangelical storefront churches, and the main entrance of the penal compound where creative entrepreneurs sell products/services to prison visitors. She focuses on everyday practices (i.e. commensality and parenting), kinship rituals (birthdays, baptisms, funerals, etc.), and gendered social relations (between/among men, women, and children prisoners and non-prisoners) that traverse prison walls in order to reveal often overlooked aspects of imprisonment. At stake with this project is the question of how people maintain and (un)make social relations under conditions of crisis and, thereby, (re)produce, work with and against, but also exceed carceral logics.