Call for Papers

Framing the penal colony

22-23 November 2019, National Justice Museum, UK

Whether presented as a tabula rasa onto which all the hopes, desires, pathologies and detritus of Empire might be projected, as a brilliant story of nation-state building via a hearty mix of backbreaking labour and genocide, or as an abandoned scarred landscape of failed utopian dreams, the penal colony is a space as much imagined as real. This conference will explore historical and contemporary representations of the penal colony as philosophical concept, political project and geographical imaginary. While direct challenges to existing historiographies are anticipated, the intention is to consider the role of visual culture, maps, photography, cinema, graphic novels/comics, museums in ‘framing’ the penal colony alongside literature, philosophy, politics. If the penal colony is generally considered to belong to the past, its legacy remains in the form of the prison islands and convict labour camps still operative across the globe. What can historical and contemporary representations of the penal colony tell us about its continuing legacy and what opportunities do such representations offer for thinking critically and creatively about our own ‘carceral’ present?

Proposals for papers or panels are welcome. Please send 250-word abstracts and a short bio to sophie.fuggle@ntu.ac.uk by 30 June 2019.

The conference is funded by the AHRC as part of the ‘Postcards from the bagne’ project and will be held at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, UK. The project blog can be visited here: http://cartespostalesdubagne.com

The Carceral Geography Working Group is delighted to announce two sessions at the RGS-IBG conference 2019 which consider the carceral offshore and carceral archipelagos. Join us in London to hear these and many other fantastic papers at the annual RGS-IBG conference, 27-30 August 2019!

Session 1 : Concerning carceral geographies of trouble and hope (1): The carceral offshore

Session organisers: Kimberley Peters (University of Liverpool, UK); Jennifer Turner (University of Liverpool, UK); Anna Schliehe (University of Cambridge, UK); Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham, UK)

Session chair: Jennifer Turner (University of Liverpool, UK)

1. Mobility control at sea: Cultivating the fabric of an ungovernable space – Andonea Jon Dickson (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
2. The refoulement industry and the production of carcerality at sea – Maurice Stierl (University of Warwick, UK)
3. The viapolitics of control, resistance and transient carceral spaces aboard ships – Amaha Senu (Cardiff University, UK)
4. The mobility and containment of seafarers: A changing geography of maritime conviviality – Uma Kothari (The University of Manchester, UK)
5. Island Geography; Incarceration and the Settler-Colonial State: Australia; 1788-1901– Katherine Roscoe (University of Liverpool, UK)

Session 2 :  Concerning carceral geographies of trouble and hope (2): Carceral archipelagos

Session organisers: Kimberley Peters (University of Liverpool, UK); Jennifer Turner (University of Liverpool, UK); Anna Schliehe (University of Cambridge, UK); Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham, UK)

Session chair: Anna Schliehe (University of Cambridge, UK)

1. Bounded Bodies: Carceral Spatialities of Institutional Transfer and Urban Parole Upon Indigenous Prisoners – Joshua David Michael Shaw (York University, Canada)
2. The Architecture of Protest: Making spaces of resistance from sites of repression – Melissa Fielding (University of Cambridge, UK)
3. ’Men of hard days’: experiences of hope, temporality and carcerality amongst asylum seekers in Denmark – Cecile Odgaard Jakobsen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
4. Carceral Interfaces and the Justice Journey: Precarious Moments of Justice in the Carceral Archipelago – Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham, UK) ; Deirdre Conlon (University of Leeds, UK)
5. Concerning carceral geographies: reflections on archipelagos and offshoring trouble/hope – Kimberley Peters (University of Liverpool, UK)