A New Knowledge Laboratory Is Born: "The Prison as a Practice of Freedom"

On Saturday, May 30, Liberté launched the Laboratorio de Saberes, a nine-session cycle titled "La cárcel como práctica de la libertad." The first session, called "La Libertad," brought together — via video call and live stream — guests from Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina, along with more than one hundred people who followed along and wrote in simultaneously from different points across the continent, some from penal units.

It was not a conference. It was a conversation: no one arrived with a prepared paper. That, precisely, is the cycle's central wager.

A cycle written in community

The Laboratorio de Saberes is an initiative of Universidad Liberté in partnership with IRICE (Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación) of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, and it brings together two action-research programs: Programa MADIVA and Rosario Cuna de la Paz. Its method has a name of its own: co-inspiration. Rather than presenting papers, invited participants hold a conversation; and what is said — together with contributions from those participating in the chat — is transcribed, processed, and turned into written material.

Because the cycle has a concrete destination: a collective book to be published in 2027, the year that marks sixty years since Paulo Freire's Education as the Practice of Freedom. Hence the title the team chose for this work in progress: La cárcel como práctica de la libertad: de la cultura tumbera a una cultura centrada en la vida. What began that Saturday is the first of nine conversations that will gradually shape the book.

The presentation was led by Claudia Liliana Perlo, researcher at CONICET and the Universidad Nacional de Rosario. The opening was voiced by Miguel Ángel M. Moderation was handled by Ricardo Augman — the "time gardener," as the chat named him — and the closing summary by Luis Triana, joining from Colombia. The cycle's editorial team is made up of María Celeste Carlín, Ricardo Augman, Luis Triana, Juan Matías Bongiovanni, and Perlo herself.

"What is freedom?": the morning's conversation

The session opened with a question turned into a prompt — what is freedom? Is it obtained, granted, taken away? — and with the cycle's own method, co-inspiration: invited participants do not present papers; they converse, while more than one hundred people think in parallel from the chat. The idea that ran through the morning was to think of freedom inside prison not as a state or a permission granted by a third party, but as a practice.

The conversation was opened by Marcela Gaete, joining from Chile, who turned the premise on its head: who practices freedom in prison? She insisted on situating freedom in subjects anchored in their own history, and on refusing to depoliticize suffering. Across two panels, voices from Argentina and Colombia joined in — including those who think about incarceration from the inside — along with Leslie Martínez, from Mexico and feminist applied philosophy, who showed how freedom is built relationally, among women themselves, starting from something as basic as calling each person by their name.

Two voices to think about freedom

The first session brought together educators and researchers who teach and build in contexts of incarceration and social vulnerability, from four countries. After the conversation ended, we asked participants for a reflection on what this first Laboratorio left behind. Two of those voices — from Chile and from Mexico — join this article.

Marcela Gaete Vergara (Chile) — holds a doctorate in education from the Universidad de Chile and directs the Red Chilena de Pedagogía en Contextos Carcelarios y Exclusión Social.

A space for dialogue about knowledge in prison education should weave together the experiences, feelings, and perspectives of educators, professionals, and incarcerated people, in order to build educational spaces outside the logic of the "Re-s" — reintegration, rehabilitation, re-socialization — challenging processes of prisonization in favor of practices of participation, autonomy, dignity, and freedom. In other words: the educational space as an enabler of a pedagogy of potential presence.

Leslie Jazmania Martínez Panduro (Jalisco, Mexico) — educator from the Universidad Intercultural de Colima and member of the education, social pedagogy, and prisons laboratory at the Universidad de Guadalajara; works from feminist applied philosophy.

What makes a conversation like this possible is recognizing that, even though we inhabit different realities, we share ethical and political questions about freedom, dignity, and the conditions that make life possible. I leave with the strength of situated dialogue: hearing how freedom is thought about from Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina broadened my perspective and reaffirmed that feminist applied philosophy is built with others, from experience and collective responsibility.

The conversation didn't stay at the table

While the invited guests conversed, more than one hundred people were thinking in parallel from the chat: teachers, students, organizational teams, family members, and people writing from penal units across different provinces. It was not an audience watching from the outside: it was one more table — the largest one.

At Liberté we have all kinds of sentences and all kinds of people. This space is genuinely inclusive.

Among the questions that circulated, one turned the conventional thinking about life "after" incarceration on its head:

People always talk about whether the person is ready to reintegrate into society — but is society ready to receive them?

Cooperativa Liberté is an example of how we, as incarcerated people, take our place in the system.

The cycle continues

Each session adds a layer to the book the editorial team will publish in 2027. What is thought aloud on Saturdays becomes, afterward, written words for those who could not be there. The Laboratorio is only just beginning.