In 2022, BPI expanded its programmatic support for the first time internationally. Partnering with Incarceration Nations Network, BPI regranted funding from the Open Society University Network (OSUN) to higher education in prison programs outside of the United States and launched a Global Research Fellowship and Virtual Lecture Series. Through this work, BPI has created a global community of practice and funded a convening of international educators who work in prisons in Argentina in April 2023.
The global community is also represented annually in cohorts of the Summer Residency, with practitioners joining BPI from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Jamaica, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, and more.
BPI Global Research Fellowship
The BPI Global Research Fellowship is a twelve-month position created to support BPI’s international community-building work and increase knowledge about the landscape of education in prison across the world.
In her role as the 2024 BPI Global Research Fellow, Josefina will spend her fellowship writing and publishing about budding and existing higher education initiatives in prisons across Latin America and elsewhere around the world.
Over the last two decades, she has lived and traveled extensively across Latin America documenting human rights, organized crime, and security issues for organizations including Amnesty International, InSight Crime, the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime and the Washington Office on Latin America, among others. She has also reported from the region for media outlets including The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, BBC, Vice, Newsweek en Español and La Nación.
More recently, she co-founded In.Visibles, a digital platform amplifying the stories of people caught up between violence at the hands of criminal organizations and government policies that criminalize them. She lives between her native Buenos Aires, Melbourne, and London.
Explore Josefina’s Global Research Fellowship work below.
Past Global Research Fellows
BPI’s inaugural Global Research Fellow was Ramiro Gual, a Ph.D. candidate at National University of Litoral in Argentina here. Ramiro used his fellowship with BPI to write and publish several academic articles and a book-length manuscript including “In-prison University Programs in Argentina: Building Citizenship” in the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (2023.)
Cultural Exchange
In April 2023, BPI staff members and alumni joined with colleagues and former Summer Residency attendees from across the globe for “ABRIR LA CÁRCEL,” a first-of-its-kind international meeting of educators in the prison context. The meeting was hosted and organized by San Martín University Center — the university-in-prison program of the National University of San Martín in Argentina — and funded by BPI with a grant from the Open Society University Network.
With over 25 universities in attendance from 16 countries across North and Latin America, Africa, and Europe, this convening deepened BPI’s work to foster a global community of practice that promotes education, not incarceration.
