When Prison Inmates Design Their Own Mediation Tools
We often imagine that people in detention are distant from scientific or climate issues. As part of the project Come Together, the science centre Universcience from Paris proved the opposite. Over six sessions, a group of inmates in France not only explored scientific content about climate, but also designed tools to share their knowledge with others.
Step by step – building up together
An open starting point
This time, nothing was defined in advance. No imposed topics, no pre-designed formats. Everything grew out of discussions with the group and with the researcher they met. Step by step, participants chose both the themes and the way they wanted to present them.
A remarkable encounter
The group also welcomed Aglaé Jezequel, a climate researcher specializing in extreme weather events. The exchange was particularly lively, full of questions, comments, and personal reflections. For the inmates, this direct dialogue with a scientist was experienced as a rare and valuable moment.
The final choice
From these conversations emerged the idea of creating mini-exhibitions. Each piece featured a flap: on the outside, a question they themselves had raised; on the inside, an answer built from the documents they had read and summarized.
Reading, understanding, synthesizing … at full speed!
What struck us? Their appetite for reading and learning. Articles, studies, documentation: rarely have we seen a group so eager to dive into texts. What was planned for three hours was done in half that time, leaving room for discussions on source reliability, multiple viewpoints, and critical thinking.
Why It worked
The absence of a pre-set framework gave the project a true sense of ownership.Their speed and rigor in analyzing documentation showed an exceptional motivation.The flap-format exhibitions turned their own questions into powerful learning devices.The exchange with an expert was experienced as a rare and valuable opportunity.
What We observed
Beyond the tangible outcome, the strongest result was a shared sense of pride. Pride in reading, understanding, debating. Pride in producing mediation objects that could inform others. Inmates showed a rigor and speed in handling scientific resources.
Key Takeaways
Start without a fixed format: let participants choose the themes and outputs.
Trust in motivation: even in unexpected contexts, curiosity can drive impressive results.
Build mediation tools around their questions, not predefined answers.
Ensure experts engage in dialogue, not lectures.
In Conclusion
This series of sessions showed how, by starting from people’s interests, it is possible to build together meaningful mediation tools — even in detention settings. The project highlighted both the potential and the limits of such actions: rich, constructive, but still temporary within a broader context.
Tina Palaić, PhD, is the Head of the Curatorial Department at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, and the national coordinator for the "Come Together!" project at the SEM. She is responsible for non-European collections with a specific interest in the time of the socialist Yugoslavia. Palaić has experience with co-researching heritage with various communities, among them the Roma community in Slovenia.
