The 2017 AAG (American Association of Geographers) conference takes place next week (5-9 April) in Boston, and there will be four sessions on carceral geography.
Confinement is on the move. In recent years, governments around the world have resorted to deploying the spatial power of incarceration in its many architectural, legal, and embodied forms to shutter away an enormous number of lives that are deemed undesirable, undocumented or dangerous. From the U.S.’ enormous federal and state prison system to Libya’s migrant jails at the edges of the E.U., the confinement of bodies has been used as a panacea for complex political and economic crises, often exacerbating the very problems they claim to resolve and creating a global underclass of people confined and/or surveilled by the state and for-profit contractors. Geographers have played a critical role in research on confinement, including: the political economy of prisons, the proliferation of immigrant detention, the affective and embodied life inside detention, historical geographies of confinement, and the prevalence of mobile carceral networks. We aim to move existing literature forward by challenging the apparent differences between various types of confinement (such as incarceration and immigrant detention), widening our discussion of confinement beyond the U.S. and U.K., and deepening our methodological and theoretical frameworks for analyzing carceral geographies.
1205 Global Carceral Geographies I: Carceral Experiences is scheduled on Wednesday, 5th April , from 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM in Room 105, Hynes, Plaza Level.
In this session, we focus specifically on how people experience incarceration as a spatial technology of power. The session features papers from:
Anna Schliehe, Dr – University of Cambridge Dialogues across carceral space: comparative research and the case of penal exceptionalism
Anaïs Tschanz – University of Montreal Carceral (im)mobilities and inmate experience of distance in the Canadian province of Quebec.
Nicolas Sallée – Université de Montréal Imprisoned rehabilitation? The carceral nature of a Quebec secure juvenile facility.
Jennifer Turner – University of Liverpool; Dominique Moran – University of Birmingham; Yvonne Jewkes – University of Brighton Serving time with a sea view: escaping prison via therapeutic blue space
1405 Global Carceral Geographies II: Carceral Societies is scheduled on Wednesday 5th April from 12:40 PM – 2:20 PM in Room 105, Hynes, Plaza Level
In this session, we focus specifically on incarceration and the management of confined bodies as an endemic symptom of social violence. The session features papers from:
Olivier Milhaud – University Paris-Sorbonne, UMR ENeC CNRS A theoretical framework for confinement (prisons, distance, discontinuities, France)
Julie De Dardel – University of Geneva Ethics in and after the field in prison research
1505 Global Carceral Geographies III: Confining the Other is scheduled on Wednesday 5th April from 2:40 PM – 4:20 PM in Room 105, Hynes, Plaza Level
In this session, we focus specifically on the role of confinement in creating and reinforcing notions of geographic, legal, and social “otherness”. The session features papers from:
Lauren Martin – Durham University The Carceral Mobilities of Cash: Outsourcing, Digital Surveillance, and Refused Asylum-seeker Assistance in the United Kingdom
Leigh Barrick – University of British Columbia Separating families to maintain family unity, and other paradoxes of U.S. deterrence policy
Austin Kocher – The Ohio State University, Department of Geography The Legal Construction of Space: On the Juridical Relationship Between Immigrant Detention, Immigration Courts, and Border Enforcement in the United States
Adam Joseph Barker – University of Leicester Carcerality and Indigeneity: the roots of ‘Indian territory’ in Turtle Island (North America)
1605 Global Carceral Geographies IV: Carceral Intersections is scheduled on Wednesday 5th April, from 4:40 PM – 6:20 PM in Room 105, Hynes, Plaza Level.
In this session, we focus specifically on the intersections between incarceration and other forms of political power and social control. The session features papers from:
Emma Marshall – University of Exeter Investigating the possibilities of online activism as a challenge to carceral space
Jesse Proudfoot – Durham University Scaling Addiction
Odilka Sabrina Santiago – Binghamton University Predictive Policing and the Transformation of Carceral Space: Promotes, rather than, Prevents Violence
Christophe Mincke – National Institute for Forensic Science and Criminology From confinement to monitoring. The carceral as management of the transitory
Elsewhere in the program, carceral geographers will also surely be interested to attend:
2492 PREM: The Daily Life of Police Violence on Thursday, 6th April, from 1:20 PM – 3:00 PM in Provincetown, Marriott, Fourth Floor
3192 PREM: Racialized State Power and the Problem of Reform on Friday, 7th April, from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM in Provincetown, Marriott, Fourth Floor
and
3492 PREM: A Roundtable on Prisons, Racism, Empire, Militarism
on Friday, 7th April 2017, from 1:20 PM – 3:00 PM in Provincetown, Marriott, Fourth Floor
…and papers from…
Brett Story, Post-Doctoral Fellow – CUNY Graduate Center The Prison in the City
Vanessa Anne Massaro, PhD – Bucknell University “In and outta jail”: State reliance on family support networks through prisons’ revolving door
Shaul Cohen – University of Oregon Transcending Space, Embracing Time: Geographic Imagination From Within a Prison
Madeleine Hamlin – Syracuse University Second Chances in the Second City: Mapping Chicago’s Carceral Continuum
Jen Bagelman,- Exeter University Subterranean Detention & Sanctuary from below
Richard Nisa – Fairleigh Dickinson University Laboratories of Enemy Behavior: Cold War Social Science and the Korean War Prison
Bella Robinson – CoyoteRI, and Elena Shih – Brown University Policing Modern Day Slavery: Sex Work and the Carceral State in Rhode Island
Carceral Geography 