Know-how ... Justice?
Situated learning and socio-technical skills for defending oneself against imprisonment
Abstract
During the year 2017 I did fieldwork in a prison located in the Province of Buenos Aires. There I ethnographically documented a literacy experience in which teachers and students were imprisoned. I was particularly interested in the fact that the literacy educators proposed one day of the week to work on specific contents of legal literacy, teaching two legal briefs.
In this article I will describe the situated learning processes of legal knowledge, showing its socio-technical aspects, through the prison trajectory of one of the literacy teachers. I will seek to demonstrate how and why, in the context of deprivation of liberty, he became an expert in this technical knowledge. On the other hand, I am interested in giving an account of my learning process during my visits to the court offices. In both cases, I will demonstrate how interactions with judicial actors reveal the power asymmetries that shape the criminal justice system, as a sociotechnical system, while enabling subtle transformations.