Call for Papers: 7th Nordic Geographers Meeting

Stockholm, Sweden, 18-21 June 2017

Session Title: Conceptualising a Trans-Species Carceral Geography

Convenors: Karen M. Morin (Bucknell University) & Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham)

Carceral geography has concerned itself with spaces of confinement very broadly conceived and operating at every scale from the global to the personal. Although incarceration has conventionally come to refer to the legal confinement of sentenced offenders under the jurisdiction of the state, the carceral has also come to be understood as embracing the myriad ways in which persons could be confined by other means – spaces of detention of refugees, noncitizens, asylum seekers, the trafficked and the renditioned – as well as embracing those ‘transcarceral’ spaces into which the more formally carceral constantly seeps. In this session we propose to engage with interpretations of ‘the carceral’ as also including spaces of non-human confinement. In so doing we bring together carceral geography and critical animal studies to engage with both human and nonhuman forms of confinement, enclosure, and captivity, be they state-sanctioned, quasi-legal, ad-hoc, illicit, spatially fixed, mobile, embodied or imagined, at various scales. What is it that makes us think of confinement of various kinds, human and nonhuman, as being carceral or not? The session’s objective is to think through what a trans-species carceral geography might be with a view to further consolidating the subdiscipline of carceral geography.

Please send an abstract (ca. 250 words) by Dec. 15, 2016 to Karen M. Morin (morin@bucknell.edu) and Dominique Moran (d.moran@bham.ac.uk). Decisions on papers will be made by January 15, 2017.