Month: September 2013

Prison Virtual Theme Issue

/ carceralgeography

A virtual theme issue on prisons at the Society and Space open site (papers from Environment and Planning D open access until November).

Prison Virtual Theme Issue.

From Society and Space: “In complement to the US Carceral Society Forum, this virtual theme issue gathers a commentary, five articles, and two reviews essays from Society and Space on prisons. The articles speak to the manifold ways in which lives are lived in spaces of extreme control and surveillance. The relationships sculpted in and through prison spaces, and relations enduring the forced separation of incarceration, are central in all of them.

Carceral Geography at the AAG 2014: Call for Papers on Historical Geographies of Prisons and Jails

/ carceralgeography

Call for Papers, 2014 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Tampa, FL, April 8-12, 2014logo_aag

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF PRISONS AND JAILS

Organizers:
Karen M. Morin, Bucknell University
Dominique Moran, Birmingham University

What have historical geographers contributed to discussions of incarceration – what prison spaces, knowledges, and practices have caught our attention, and why? Following on last year’s AAG Historical Geography plenary, “Carceral Space and the Usable Past,” this session aims to bring together the work of historical geographers, as well as those who use historical-geographical logics and perspectives, to examine conceptions of crime, regimes of punishment, and their corresponding spaces of “corrections” and confinement. Broadly, the session aims to incorporate a historical-spatial focus into the study of correctional institutions (prisons and jails) and their larger social contexts. Relevant treatments of prison/jail space would include: 1) historical study of the nature of spaces of incarceration, individuals’ experiences in them, and their regulatory regimes and systems of punishment; 2) historical study of the spatial or distributional/ locational geographies of carceral systems, particularly with respect to their impact on community economic development and local geographies; and 3) study of the historical relationship between the carceral and an increasingly punitive state. Historical geographers can inform, and be informed by, these three areas of carceral geography that we like to term, after Tosh, “critical applied historical geography” that can be put in action for progressive social transformation.

Suggested topics within this theme of Historical Geographies of Prisons and Jails include (but are not limited to) the following, and may cover a wide geographical arena:
•    the spatial fixity and spatial legacy of prison sites at various scales
•    prison towns and their social-spatial logics and priorities of development
•    individual correctional structures, their design, architectures, and lived experience
•    dark tourist sites: the jail or penitentiary as museum space and/or memorial
•    local, small scale heritage sites of corrections, for instance in settlement communities
•    relationships between correctional institutions and the development of urban space, particularly alongside racial and other social topographies
•    decommissioned and re-commissioned corrections sites
•    prisons as living memory
•    prisons, jails, and local cultural geographies
•    punishment regime shifts and their counterparts in use of interior prison spaces (that is, spatial tactics of punishment historically)
•    new prison design within a developmental context
•    media treatments of historical sites of corrections and punishment (film, television, art)

Submissions: Please submit 250-word abstracts to both Karen M. Morin (morin@bucknell.edu) and Dominique Moran (d.moran@bham.ac.uk) by Monday 21st October 2013.