Thanks to a wonderful response to the Call for Papers, Shaul Cohen and I have been able to organise a number of sessions on Carceral Geography for the AAG 2013 in Los Angeles this April.

 The so-called ‘punitive turn’ has brought new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Geographical engagements with incarceration have put these spaces, and experiences within them, firmly on the disciplinary map. Human geography, and specifically the evolving sub-discipline of carceral geography, have much to offer to the study of incarceration, and taking the carceral as a locus of research offers useful opportunities both to invigorate ongoing developments within human geography, and to contribute to positive social change.

Carceral geography is a new but a fast-moving and fast-developing sub-discipline, and is proving an increasingly vibrant field. These sessions provide a space for discussion of recent scholarship, situating it in the context both of contemporary human geography and of the interdisciplinary literature from criminology and prison sociology upon which it draws, and to also explore a range of potential avenues of future research which are open to transdisciplinarity, which are both informed by and extend theoretical developments in geography, but which also, and critically, interface with contemporary debates over hyperincarceration and the punitive state.

There will be four sessions in all, sponsored by the Cultural Geography Specialty Group of the AAG – three paper sessions and a roundtable session for a forthcoming book: Details are:

Carceral Geography: Debates, Developments and Directions I

•  Anna Schliehe, ‘It rips my knittin’ – The nature and experience of spaces of confinement for girls and young women in Scotland
• Elizabeth Brown, Carceral geographies from the body to the nation: The ‘will to change’, and the spatial regulation of incarcerated youth
• Peter Wagner, Mass incarceration across the racial divide: Looking for an answer in the U.S. Census
• Julie De Dardel, Mobile Prison Policies: Prisons as Global Forms in the Age of Mass Incarceration
• William Damon, Community Control Outside the City: Area Restrictions and Conditional Release in B.C’s Interior

Carceral Geography: Debates, Developments and Directions II

• Brett Story, The prison ‘outside’: A rematerialization of the prison in the everyday life of the urban ‘million-dollar block
• Jack Norton, Prisons, Infrastructure, and Development in the New Empire State
• Sallie Yea, “Singapore is my Prison”: Trafficked and Exploited Migrant Workers (Im)mobile Geographies in Singapore
• Colleen McTague, Felonious restraint: are felons imprisoned by the day labor industry?
• Kevin Raleigh, An Invisible Incarceration: How the Law Establishes Virtual Imprisonment of Employees of Temporary Day Labor Agencies in Ohio

Carceral Geography: Debates, Developments and Directions III ‘Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention’

This session coalesces around a new edited book which defines a new field in geographical research, drawing together the work of a new community of scholars and a growing body of work in carceral geography – the geographical engagement with the practices of imprisonment and migrant detention. Increasingly, these spheres overlap. Just as ‘mainstream’ prison populations have expanded over the past twenty-five years, there has also been a veritable explosion in the use of detention for irregular migrants. Migrants are increasingly scrutinized as criminals, so much so that scholars and activists now refer to this nexus as ‘crimmigration’. This book brings together scholars whose work engages practices of imprisonment and/or migrant detention with the goal of opening up a forum within geography and related interdisciplinary fields of study (critical prison studies, criminology, etc.) for conversation / dialogue across these ever more intertwined spheres.

Organisers and Panelists: Dominique Moran, Nick Gill, Deirdre Conlon, Lauren Martin, Kelsey Nowakowski, Mason McWatters, Julie de Dardel

Carceral Geography: Debates, Developments and Directions IV

• Adam Morse, The Geopolitical Imaginations and Discursive Context of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: The Politics of Identity and Spatial Racism
• Anne K Knowles, Paul B. Jaskot and Benjamin Perry Blackshear, Spatialities of the SS Concentration Camps
• Francois Debrix, Geographies of Horror: Judith Butler’s Topologies of Vulnerability and the Pluralization of Camp Life
• Eric Weber, Phil Coleman, Eddie Bright and Amy Rose Spatially Precise Accounting of Prisoner Populations in Nighttime Population Models
• Amy Buitenhuis, Public-Private Partnerships for Prison Infrastructure Delivery in Ontario: The Impacts of Neoliberal Shifts in Governance Scale and Structure

Follow @carceralgeog