Conference of Irish Geographers (virtual) May 18-21, 2021.

Session co-organizers: Deirdre Conlon, University of Leeds

Sasha Brown, Maynooth University,

Joseph S. Robinson, Maynooth University

In February 2021, the Irish government announced plans to end the direction provision system—originally introduced in 2000—for asylum seekers by 2024. While the exact character of the ‘new’ system to respond to irregular migration remains unclear, the government’s proposals appear to echo elements of Ireland’s “breathtaking history of incarceration” (Lentin, 2016: 24), which is characterised by the confinement and repressive control of marginalised individuals in institutions including psychiatric hospitals, industrial schools, workhouses, mother and baby homes, Magdalene Laundries, and Direct Provision Centres (O’Sullivan & O’Donnell, 2012). With this, questions related to exclusion, dignity, justice, and responsibilities toward marginalised members of communities, in Ireland, as elsewhere, (re)surface yet again.  

This juncture, alongside the 2021 CIG conference theme—geographies of responsibilities—provide an opportunity to reflect on the contributions, synergies, and future directions for scholarship and activities among those whose work engages space(s) of critical migration, confinement, social control, and the carceral more broadly. This session offers a forum for so doing and is informed by the following questions: How can or should critical geography contribute to understanding confinements—historical or contemporary—in the Irish state? How have scholars, artists, activists, and organisers exposed and challenged temporal and/or spatial continuities across sites of confinement, control, or incarceration? What new insights can we generate by thinking spatially about such systems of social control? What sorts of new (or recurring) questions can critical geographers help illuminate in light of the emergence of a new phase of migrant social control? 

This themed session is envisioned as a series with invited panelists (TBC), brief presentations and open discussion among new, emerging, and established researchers. To this end, we invite expressions of interest in contributing reflections, brief accounts, and provocations in the form of 10 min. presentations from those interested in or engaged with the geographies of migrant ‘accommodation’, detention, confinement, carceral systems and social control in and beyond the Irish state. 

*Please send expressions of interest/abstracts of no more than 250 words by April 28^th 2021 to Deirdre Conlon d dot conlon at leeds dot ac dot uk, corresponding session organizer. Requests for bursaries can be made via the conference website (form available here).