New research led by Birmingham Fellow Dr Melanie Griffiths being launched on 8^th June explores the impact of the UK’s immigration system on mixed-nationality families. Researchers followed 30 couples and families to examine the ways in which their lives were affected by one member’s insecure immigration status and the threat of separation through immigration detention, removal or deportation.

In-depth interviews with these couples were combined with interviews with practitioners from legal, private, state and civil society sectors, observation of deportation appeals and analysis of changing policies around immigration and Article 8 (the right to respect for one’s private and family lives). The research shows how precarious immigration status of one family member has significant and wide-ranging impact on the whole family, including British citizens and children. As a result of a parent or partner’s immigration status, British citizens find themselves also living under chronic insecurity, with the ongoing threat of either being separated or forced to leave the UK. The whole family find themselves harmed; often in extreme ways and across all aspects of their lives. People are made sicker, poorer, unhappier and disenfranchised from their citizenship. Children’s behaviour, mental health, education, financial security and feelings of Britishness and belonging are significantly affected.

The report from this project is being launched at an online webinar at 4pm on 8^th June 2021, in collaboration with the NGO Bail for Immigration Detainees and Chaired by Baroness Shami Chakrabati CBE. All are welcome at this event and for discussion with speakers including Sonali Naik QC and a parent directly affected by these issues. Please register on the event page.  For more information about the project and its outputs (including blog posts, journal articles and policy briefings), please visit the project webpage.

There is a new job vacancy for a 3-year postdoctoral Research Scientist position at The Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) in Oldenburg, Germany, offering an opportunity for an early career scholar to work on the carceral seas.

The HIFMB is a new institute on interdisciplinary marine biodiversity research, established on the campus of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, which is home to the Institute for Social Sciences, where carceral geographer Dr Jennifer Turner is based. The Institute is developing ties to the HIFMB through various projects including some of Jennifer’s recent research developments on carceral seas.

The postdoc would be appointed to the recently established Marine Governance Research Group led by Professor Kimberley Peters. Accordingly, the HIFMB joins expertise in marine functional ecology, data science and theory with great social science and humanities profiles.

The link to the full advert is below, but your attention is particularly drawn to the noted desirable criteria of: Experience working with key conceptual ideas such as borders, boundaries and carcerality, as well as space, power and territory.

Although certainly a slightly new direction for carceral scholars, the considerations about crime/sanction management at sea might be a welcome new research trajectory for scholars who have, in particular, experience in qualitative methods.

The position

This Research Scientist position will work to spatialise understandings of monitoring, reporting and sanctioning at sea. Despite of the proliferation of marine management and conservation tools to steward over and protect ocean life and resources, there remains a gap in the effectiveness of those tools through limited regimes of monitoring, reporting and sanctioning. This position aims to “follow” cases of marine policy contraventions to track narratives of monitoring, reporting and sanctioning at sea to understand its presence and absence. Moreover, it will use ideas from geography to spatialise understandings of how bounded modes of governance for biodiversity succeed or fail. In doing so, the project will bring insights into possibilities for more effective routes to marine governance (whilst also critically assessing what constitutes an “effective” regime and for what and whom). Moreover, it is intended that the position will use such investigations to also progress spatial theories of borders, containment and control and their application for marine biodiversity outcomes.

2 PhD positions and a further Research Scientist vacancy are also advertised. These are not related to carcerality but you might wish to pass these along to anyone currently on the job search.  https://www.awi.de/en/work-study/jobs/job-offer.html

In recent decades the administrative detention of “illegal” immigrants has spread throughout the world as one of the main strategies to regulate migrations. From the perspective of national governments detention is essential: how else could they identify or expel those who lack a right to stay? It is only through the forced immobilization of people that these tasks become possible. The results of this logic have been worrisome and dramatic. The detention and confinement of non-citizen have turned into routine practices to facilitate the administration of immigration. Conditions inside centers for removal or “hotspots” have been proven to be harsh and horrible, and the current pandemic is having devastating effects on those who are detained or held at borders.

Some scholars and observers have considered the growth of these practices as exceptional: to their view, detention represents a radical departure from the rule of law and an expression of authoritarianism and nationalism. But others point out that Western states have always included forms of administrative control to manage “risky” subjects, and that detention operates in accordance with these. According to them, detention represents a standard form of confinement against those who are perceived as dangerous or problematic: with the relevant difference that dangerousness appears to be directly linked to foreignness in this case. Regardless of our personal position, we want to ask how the present state of detention systems relates to previous and contemporary strategies to control “dangerous” populations. We can’t deny that the confinement of “aliens” has a long and obscure history. The idea of creating camps to confine, control, or even exterminate unwanted populations has been a terrible paradigm of modernity in Europe and the United States. What can this history tell us about immigration detention? Is the concentration camp a useful paradigm to analyze detention centers?

Moreover, despite the links between past and present, it is undeniable that immigration detention presents several new traits than these previous experiences. The process of detaining is regulated by national and international law, and it operates on understandings of security and risk that undergird contemporary strategies of governance. It is also becoming harder to identify the “state” as a monolithic entity operating with full agency in the current scenario. Detention systems resents the presence of NGOs and supranational organizations that are capable of affecting their organization and structure in ways that complicate linear and national accounts. And finally, the presence of private actors in managing and owning the centers represents another important discontinuity with the past.

Following up from these reflections, the conference aims at finding the best instruments to analyze the topic from historical and geographical perspectives. In order to achieve this goal, we ask the following questions:

• Is the paradigm of the concentration camp still useful to analyze present detention centers?
• What is the role of private actors, and how do they affect the current spaces of internment?
• What is, and has been, the role of the nation state to control, identify, and remove “dangerous” populations? What is the role of supranational organizations such as the EU and how do they participate in the making of detention?
• How has the concept of citizenship influenced, and how does it reflect strategies of exclusion?
• What kind of spaces are detention centers, hotspots, or refugee camps? How can space be used to exclude?
• What have been the effects of the Covid 19 pandemic on immigration detention and on the lives of those who are detained?

Proposals of max 200 words are accepted both in English and Italian and should be sent by April 10th to Ettore Asoni, San Diego State University (easoni2041@sdsu.edu) and Alessandro Pes, University of Cagliari (alessandropes@unica.it). Proposals will be selected by April 18th.

We intend to hold the conference in person at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Cagliari in Cagliari, Italy, on the 15th and 16th of July 2021. However, due to the current pandemic situations we cannot predict whether this will be possible, or we will have to move the conference to an online platform. We will keep the participants informed in a timely manner about this decision. Thank you for your understanding.

In the recent decades the administrative detention of “irregular” migrants has spread throughout the world as one of the main strategies adopted by nation states to assert control over migration, and to secure their territories and borders. Many scholars and observers consider the current developments as exceptional, and they believe them to represent a dramatic reaction from nation states against the challenges posed by migration fluxes. However, others have pointed out that detention has long been considered as a necessary prerogative of the state in order to identify, and eventually expel, dangerous individuals. According to this second perspective,the current situation should be seen as a development within the law, and not as sparking from a state of exception.

Regardless of our personal position, it is necessary to ask how the present state of the detention system for migrants relates to previous (and contemporary) strategies to control populations perceived as dangerous. Scholars have pointed out the similarities between detention centers and the various forms taken by the “concentration camp” in the last two centuries: the colonial camp, the internment camps during wars, the extermination camp, war refugees camp, etc… However, others have pointed to the crucial differences between the current forms of detention and the ones cited above.

Specifically, it is becoming harder to identify the “state”as a monolithic entity that operates with full agency in the current scenario. The presence of private actors, who are often almost as powerful as the state, represents an apparent discontinuity with the past. In many cases, private actors appear not only to manage detention centers, but also to lobby and operate in ways that address state policies or at least influence them in such ways that these actors cannot be seen as simple recipients of state decisions any longer. Starting from these considerations, this conference aims to spark critical and constructive reflections in order to find the best instruments to analyze the topic from historical and geographical perspectives.

In order to achieve this goal, the conference will ask the following questions: –

Is the paradigm of the concentration camp still useful to analyze present detention centers?

What is the role of private actors and how do they affect the current spaces of internment? –

What is, and has been, the role of the nation state to control, identify, and remove “dangerous” populations?

What is the role of supranational organizations such as the EU and how do they participate in the making of detention?

What is the role of international organizations, NGOs, and humanitarian associations,and how do they participate in, or oppose, detention?

How has the concept of citizenship influenced, and how does it reflect previous and current strategies of exclusion?

What kind of spaces are the camps?

How can space be used to exclude?

The call for papers is addressed to both PhDs and senior scholars. The conference will be held at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Cagliari in Cagliari (Italy) on the 9th and 10th of July 2020. Proposals of max 200 words are accepted both in English and Italian and should be sent by March 15th to Ettore Asoni, San Diego State University (easoni2041@sdsu.edu) and Alessandro Pes, University of Cagliari (alessandropes@unica.it). Proposals will be selected by April 1st.

Custodial design (i.e. of correctional facilities, prisons, jails) has become big news. The scale and cost of incarceration has seen attention drawn to its effectiveness in delivering intended outcomes, with architecture and design recently coming under considerable media scrutiny. Whilst drawing attention to the structural violence of the carceral state, and arguing for decarceration, academic researchers are, in parallel, turning their attention to the effects of architectural and design elements on those who live, work in, or visit these facilities.

In the past, custodial design has prioritised the designing-out of risk (of escape, and of violence against the self and others). Whilst these considerations remain critical, more recently the balance has swung towards more aspirational – and controversial – ideas that facilities could instead be rehabilitative, even therapeutic environments that foster wellbeing.

We may know more than ever before about how built environments influence wellbeing in general, but the question of what custodial facilities should be like remains a challenging one. Policymakers may be open to new design ideas, but in managing tight budgets, they often require a challenging level of evidential proof of effect before changes are made.

This workshop presents research from leading international researchers addressing the question of ‘what works?’ in custodial design to deliver a rehabilitative, therapeutic environment, or other ‘positive’ outcomes. It will also help to scope out future research in this area.

All are welcome to attend – particularly prison and justice professionals, policymakers and practitioners who may be able to make use of the insights provided through the research presented, and whose input will help shape future research design.

Speakers will include:

Dominique Moran University of Birmingham, UK – Nature contact and wellbeing in prison

Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill City University of New York, USA

Kevin Bradley University of Technology, Sydney, Australia – Characterisation of custodial design through the lens of ‘citizenship’.

Elisabeth Fransson University College of Norwegian Correctional Services – Custodial design and the construction of hope in prison facilities for children and youths in Norway

Saul Hewish RideOut, UK – The Creative Prison Revisited

Yvonne Jewkes University of Bath, UK

Rohan Lulham, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia – Impacts of physical design on how staff and detainees are perceived in youth correctional settings.

Melissa Nadel Abt Associates, Cambridge MA, USA – Challenges and Solutions for Establishing the Impact of Custodial Design on Measurable Outcomes

Roger Paez AiB Architects, Barcelona, Spain – Critical Prison Design – Between Pragmatic Engagement and the Dream of Decarceration

Ashley Rubin University of Hawaii, USA – Learning from lessons of past prison design.

Julie Stevens Iowa State University – From Grey to Green: A Case for New Standards for the Correctional Natural Landscape

Victor St. John City University of New York. USA

Christine Tartaro Stockton University, USA – Culture Change within Facilities that Incarcerate

Barb Toews University of Washington, USA – Prioritizing accountability and reparations: Restorative justice design and infrastructure

The workshop will be held at the University of Birmingham, UK on 30-31 March 2020.

Attendance is free and delegates are invited to register here. Optional day catering and a conference dinner (limited numbers) can be added to bookings. Registrations with catering/dinner must be completed by 20th March 2020; registrations without catering will be taken until 28th March 2020.

The research team “Ecoppaf” (Economics of punishment and prison in Africa) at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne will be reissuing its Massive Open Online course in Prisons in Africa in 2020, and for 2020, the MOOC is subtitled in English.

The course will not start until March, but FREE registrations to follow the MOOC are now open.

To register you must first open an account on Fun MOOC, then choose “Prisons in Africa” in the offers, and then email reminders will be sent to you to say when it will start.

This online course, open to all, offers a multidisciplinary approach to prison dynamics on the African continent. It is intended for all professionals involved in prison matters (health, reform, etc.), associations and students and anyone interested in prison matters and human rights. It also offers a platform for exchanging experiences. Do not hesitate to subscribe and distribute in your networks! MOOC transcripts are available for free here: https://ecoppaf.hypotheses.org/873 (and in English in January).

How can we assemble accounts of the evasive forms of violence lodged in material pasts and futures in this era of fake news, omnipresent data and affective politics? Who is accountable for the violent afterlives of infrastructures? In a time when many of the established boundaries that structured common understandings of violations and responsibilities, matter and people, increasingly turn out unsettled, we urgently need to explore post-disciplinary and cross-domain methodologies to uncover the politics of violence.

Custodial design (i.e. of correctional facilities, prisons, jails) has become big news. The scale and cost of incarceration has seen attention drawn to its effectiveness in delivering intended outcomes, with architecture and design recently coming under considerable media scrutiny. Whilst drawing attention to the structural violence of the carceral state, and arguing for decarceration, academic researchers are, in parallel, turning their attention to the effects of architectural and design elements on those who live, work in, or visit these facilities.

In the past, custodial design has prioritised the designing-out of risk (of escape, and of violence against the self and others). Whilst these considerations remain critical, more recently the balance has swung towards more aspirational – and controversial – ideas that facilities could instead be rehabilitative, even therapeutic environments that foster wellbeing.

We may know more than ever before about how built environments influence wellbeing in general, but the question of what custodial facilities should be like remains a challenging one. Policymakers may be open to new design ideas, but in managing tight budgets, they often require a challenging level of evidential proof of effect before changes are made.

This call is therefore for proposals for chapters for a collection edited by Dominique Moran, Yvonne Jewkes, Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill and Victor St.John, asking ‘what works?’ in custodial design to deliver a rehabilitative, therapeutic environment, or other ‘positive’ outcomes?

The call is addressed to researchers in all disciplines, working in all geographical contexts, whose work addresses one or more of the following questions, whether in relation to the custodial environment as a whole, or to elements of it:

1. How can we characterise or categorise custodial buildings/environments? How can we describe them in ways that enable us to determine the effects of their characteristics?
2. How can we characterise the intended outcomes of custodial design? Should design prioritise, for example, ‘humanisation’, ‘normalisation’, or ‘wellbeing’, and how do we recognise and evaluate these in practice? What other ‘positive’ or desirable outcomes might custodial design encourage (for example, recovery, rehabilitation, aspiration, future orientation, aesthetic appreciation)?
3. How – i.e. through what causal mechanisms – do we think that these characteristics of the built environment ‘work’ in the sense of being experienced by people who are incarcerated, and by the staff who work in custodial facilities, either in the ways in which the planners and designers intended, or in unanticipated ways?
4. How can we establish whether or that these characteristics have an effect? What data and what methodologies are required to determine causality between built environments and measurable outcomes?
5. What has been proven to ‘work’ in custodial design, in terms of characteristics of the built environment, and the ways in which it fosters wellbeing or other therapeutic outcomes?

In parallel with this edited collection, an interdisciplinary workshop will be held at the University of Birmingham, UK in 2020, to enable contributors to present and discuss their work around these questions. The workshop will also be an opportunity to explore opportunities for future interdisciplinary collaboration.

Researchers are invited to send 500-word chapter abstracts to d.moran@bham.ac.uk by Monday 18^th November. Pre-submission enquiries are also very welcome.

Call for Papers: American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting | April 6-10, 2020 | Denver, CO USA

Paper Session: Food and Carceral Intersections: From Geographies of Confinement to Enactments of Abolition

Organizers: Joshua Sbicca (Colorado State University) and Becca Clark-Hargreaves (Colorado State University)

Session Description: How might we better understand food systems by attending to the penal system and vice versa? Carceral spaces – such as neighborhood zones of police surveillance and plantation prisons that exploit confined labor – reflect and reproduce systems of oppression also present in the food system (Gilmore 2007). In cities, the state regularly polices poverty instead of addressing the institutional racism and capitalist urbanization that perpetuates the lack of access to goods like healthy food (Wacquant 2009; Camp 2016). Additionally, the food system relies on carceral practices to secure disciplined labor by weaponizing the possibility of deportation for racialized undocumented workers and wielding the threat of violence to keep workers in the fields (Mitchell 1996; Horton 2016). And of course, there is slow death tied to low-quality food in prisons, prison food and agriculture industries, force feeding of prisoners, and the use of food (or its denial) as punishment (Camplin 2016; Smoyer 2019).

But there are also seeds of struggle for the abolition of penal logics and institutions that maintain the violence of the ongoing practices and legacies of colonialism, white supremacy, and institutional racism vis-à-vis food (Heynen 2016; Murguía 2018; Pellow 2018). Hunger strikes and food riots have long been used as a tool to gain the sympathy of the public, shame political opponents, and gain concessions from the state and penal officials (Scanlan et al. 2008; McGregor 2011; Bargu 2014). Food is also a site for resistance in prison, whether to celebrate cultural foodways or assert a sense of self and autonomy (Ugelvik 2011; Gibson-Light 2018). Food and environmental justice activists have also sought to intervene in mass incarceration and the prison pipeline with campaigns and initiatives that support prisoners and formerly incarcerated people (Sbicca 2016; Nocella, Ducre, and Lupinacci 2016).

This session seeks to critically explore these and other intersections between food and carceral systems, politics, ideologies, spatialities, and social movements. We are especially interested in papers working through food and carceral politics through the lens of racial capitalism, racial neoliberalism, Plantationocene and plantation ecologies, abolition ecologies, masculinities and femininities, restorative justice, environmental justice, food justice, and food sovereignty.  

Some possible orienting topics include:

• Farming, gardening, and horticulture programs in prison
• Prison food industries
• Social, cultural, and spatial dimensions of prison food
• Plantation and carceral logics and the food system
• Prison food riots and hunger strikes
• Prison abolition and reform efforts that engage with food politics
• Conversion of farmland into prisons and jails
• Impacts of toxic prisons and jails on agriculture
• Food and environmental justice activism with prisoners and formerly incarcerated people
• Social movement alliances between food and prison abolition/reform activists  

Please send paper titles and abstracts (250 words maximum) and your personal identification number (received from the AAG after registering online at www.aag.org) to Joshua Sbicca, Colorado State University (j.sbicca@colostate.edu). Please send by October 21.

References

Bargu, Banu. 2014. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Camp, J. T. 2016. Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Camplin, E., 2016. Prison Food in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Gilmore, R. W. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Heynen, N., 2016. Urban political ecology II: The abolitionist century. Progress in Human Geography, 40(6), 839-845.

Horton, S.B., 2016. They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and Illegality Among US Farmworkers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

McGregor, J., 2011. Contestations and consequences of deportability: hunger strikes and the political agency of non-citizens. Citizenship Studies, 15(5): 597-611.

Mitchell, D., 1996. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Murguía, S.J., 2018. Food as a Mechanism of Control and Resistance in Jails and Prisons: Diets of Disrepute. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Nocella II, A.J., Ducre, K.A. and Lupinacci, J. eds., 2016. Addressing Environmental and Food Justice Toward Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Poisoning and Imprisoning Youth. New York, NY: Springer.

Pellow, D.N., 2018. “Political Prisoners and Environmental Justice.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 29(4), 1-20.

Sbicca, J., 2016. These bars can’t hold us back: Plowing incarcerated geographies with restorative food justice. Antipode, 48(5), 1359-1379.

Scanlan, S.J., Cooper Stoll, L. and Lumm, K., 2008. Starving for change: The hunger strike and nonviolent action, 1906–2004. In Research in social movements, conflicts and change (275-323). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Smoyer, A.B., 2019. Food in correctional facilities: A scoping review. Appetite. 141(1).

Ugelvik, T., 2011. The hidden food: Mealtime resistance and identity work in a Norwegian prison. Punishment & Society, 13(1), 47-63.

Wacquant, L. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.