‘Inhabiting the paradox’: between punitive and pedagogical rationales in prison

This article explores tensions and possibilities of education in punitive confinement contexts through social pedagogy, drawing on fieldwork conducted with incarcerated women enrolled in a university programme in Mexico. Beyond transformation narratives, the study conceptualises prison education as a paradoxical space, shaped by institutional control and re-signified by students as a site of resistance. Through qualitative research, it analyses how women construct identities in the face of carceral logics that infantilise and stigmatise students, conditioning their education. By framing education in punitive confinement contexts as a fugitive pedagogical practice situated against confinement, the article highlights how educational experiences open cracks in the punitive order where rights are reclaimed, subjectivities are reconfigured and ‘education as anti-fate’ emerges. This article argues that liberatory education in prison entails inhabiting a paradox: it requires navigating the contradictions between pedagogy and punishment, and sustaining practices that defy institutional erasure while affirming dignity, autonomy and the right to imagine. In this liminal terrain, social pedagogy becomes a political and ethical commitment to resist the normalisation of confinement and cultivate spaces where justice is not deferred but enacted.