Abstract
This article explores the way the prisoners who pursue higher studies in prison formulate various expertise about postsecondary studies during face-to-face or mediated encounters with academic teachers/researchers. The findings further highlight the students-inmates' institutional knowledge and the practical reasoning about the "sense of studies". The approach adopted in this article is based on an audiovisual corpus involving an extensive fieldwork in various prisons, which included formal and informal teachings and interviews, either in co-presence or by videoconference.