Conference Program

Prison education (PE) occupies an inherently paradoxical space: it operates within carceral institutions shaped by punitive logic while simultaneously aspiring to foster critical consciousness, democratic participation, and human dignity. SPARK (Supporting the Penitentiary system Advancement through Reflection and Knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity) is an Erasmus+ project that aims to advance intercultural prison education and, more in general, deprivation of liberty (DoL) contexts across national contexts where the pressures of penal and security-driven priorities may marginalise transformative educational practice.

SPARK brings together partners from across Europe to co-develop a shared framework for intercultural PE, responding to a landscape in which imprisoned populations are increasingly diverse in linguistic, cultural, and migratory terms (SPACE I, 2024), but prison education systems largely remain structured around monocultural assumptions. The project proceeds from the conviction that intercultural education in prison settings is not merely an addition or a reactive measure, but a fundamentally democratic act: one that contests the homogenizing forces of DoL institutions and opens space for hybrid subjectivities, relational learning, and critical reflexivity.

Methodologically, SPARK adopts a participatory, consortium-based structure that brings together universities, penitentiary institutions, and NGO-organisations across several European countries, like Italy, Spain, Estonia or Ukraine, aiming to achieve transnational collaboration that enables comparative analysis of how institutional arrangements, professional roles, and policy environments shape the conditions for intercultural educational practice in DoL settings. Particular attention is given to the ethical tensions inherent in researching within closed institutions, including questions of access, positionality, and the asymmetries of knowledge production between academic partners and incarcerated participants. By connecting universities, penitentiary administrations, civil society organisations, and practitioners across different national contexts, SPARK creates a transnational community of practice that challenges the isolation potentially characterising PE initiatives.

This contribution reflects on SPARK's design, early findings, and conceptual commitments. The contribution also presents preliminary results from the Spanish working group within the consortium. These include an account of educational initiatives already carried out in Spanish prison settings (both from previous initiatives carried out at the University of Alcalá, and from advances from the SPARK project), the preliminary design of an intercultural education course developed in dialogue with penitentiary practitioners, and an analysis of Spanish policy frameworks concerning translation, language mediation, and interculturality in prison contexts. In doing so, we aim at contributing to broader conversations about how PE can be conceived as a transformative democratic space, and about what an intercultural approach demands from both researchers and institutions.