Issue 19 of The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies, edited by Gavin Slade, Anne Le Huérou, Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski and entitled “The Evolution of Prisons and Penality in the Former Soviet Union” is now online. 

This superb collection covers a staggering range of topics, from films of Soviet penal spaces, to medical professionals in modern Russian prisons, comprises resources in English and French, and includes English language reviews of topical books published in French and Russian, and interviews with key figures. The full edition is available here – links to individual papers/reviews are below.

Photo Credit: Belovodsk Colony no. 16, Kyrgyzstan (April 2015), ©Gavin Slade

Have you completed your PhD on a topic related to carceral geography? Would you like to spend 1-2 years at the University of Birmingham working on your next research project?

Expressions of interest are invited from outstanding post-doctoral candidates eligible to apply for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual European Fellowship at a UK host institution.  Although the Carceral Geography Lab at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham is looking to support applications in any area of carceral geography, there is a particular interest in the following topics:

• effects of nature contact in prison
• the prison-military complex
• prisons in post-conflict contexts

Qualified candidates can apply for a Fellowship, provided they have not lived or worked in the UK for more than twelve months in the three years immediately prior to the application deadline of 11^th September 2019.  For more information, see https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/msca-if-2019.

If you would be interested in working with us for 1-2 years on a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, please email an expression of interest (EoI) to Prof. Dominique Moran at d.moran@bham.ac.uk by Monday 22nd July. Please include:

• a CV with details of your academic and other relevant accomplishments
• a 1-2 page draft research proposal
• a supporting letter explaining research synergies with carceral geography and what makes you a potentially outstanding candidate for a Fellowship

Successful candidate(s) at the EoI stage will be supported in developing the full proposal and application for final submission on 11^th September 2019.

Neil Galway and Giulia Carabelli extend an invitation to a free conference + summer school that might be of interest to carceral geographers – “Interface to Place: Remaking divisive lines into shared spaces” organised in collaboration with Queen’s University Belfast and the Department of Justice – Interfaces Team.

The conference, on 12 August 2019, brings together international scholars, practitioners and decision-makers to discuss how to engage with history and heritage to imagine urban futures; how post-conflict and peace processes can be supported by inclusive approaches to planning and urban stewardship; and how we can ensure that the knowledge produced by academics, practitioners and citizens can be shared to shape the future of our cities. The conference will also serve as a platform to reflect more closely on how understandings of cities as shared spaces could inform the process of removing all interface barriers in Belfast by 2023. We will ask how interface areas could become shared spaces and how these might look like (the programme of the conference will be available shortly).

Confirmed speakers include:

• Dr Patricia Lopes Simoes Aelbrecht (Cardiff University) – https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/475472-aelbrecht-patricia
• Dr Camila Cocina (UCL) – https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/development/people/camila-cocina
• Jeroen Beekmans (Pop-Up City) – https://popupcity.net
• Dr Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse (Urban Policy) – https://urban-policy.com
• Sophie Plitt (Wild Streets) – https://www.wildstreets.org

The Summer School starts on 13 August until 16 August 2019. Led by local and international urban scholars and practitioners, participants to the Summer School will have the opportunity to work on concrete plans to transform interface areas in Belfast and get feedback from local stakeholders.

The conference and summer school are free! There is a small number of bursaries available that cover the cost of accommodation on campus for summer school participants. To be considered for one of these bursaries, applicants should provide a 2 page CV and 500 word statement of motivation to n.galway@qub.ac.uk by 19th July 2019. These scholarships are available because of generous sponsorship from Department of Justice – Interfaces team and the QUB Culture and Society research cluster.

To sign up for any of these events, click here

Is it possible to imagine a world without prisons? How would this world look? What leaps of the imagination might be required to overcome incarceration? By reading and discussing texts, images and film that shapes and contests dominant perceptions around the longevity of prison, this two-day workshop will consider the difficult long-term labour of dismantling existing carceral systems.

This workshop is also exploring the links between the world’s prison systems, racist and colonial structures. Prisons continue to perpetuate social inequality, and there is a danger that this will only intensify in the context of increased forced migration and reduced resources resulting from climate disaster.

Attendance is free. Please register to attend and to receive advance reading materials.

This event is supported as part of the AHRC-funded research project Postcards from the bagne, led by Sophie Fuggle at Nottingham Trent University.

Programme 11 July 2019

11.00am Registration with coffee

11.30-12.30 Session 1 – Imagining a world with prison. Led by Ayshka Sené, Nottingham Trent University

Selected reading: Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (Chapter 2)

12.30-1.30 Lunch (provided)

1.30-2.45 Session 2 – Nature writing. Led by Andrea Beckmann, Critical criminologist and social pedagogue

Selected reading: Henry Thoreau’s Walden; or life in the woods (extract tbc)

2.45-3.00 Break

3.00-4.00 Guest Talk. In conversation with a former resident of HMP Grendon.

Programme 12th July 2019

11.00am Welcome with Coffee

11.15am Session 3 – Against mass incarceration. Led by John Moore, Newham University

Selected reading: Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Chapter 4)

12.30 Lunch (provided)

1.30-2.45 Session 4 – Ecology and the colonial project. Led by Sophie Fuggle, Nottingham Trent University

Selected reading: Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocene’s or none (Chapter ‘The Inhumanities’)

2.45-3.00 Break

3.00-4.00 Guest Talk. Blue Bag Life (Lisa Selby and Elliot Murawski)

The Instagram account ‘bluebaglife’, gives insight into Lisa Selby and Elliot Murawski’s relationship, with their combined first hand experiences of prison, mental health and class A drug addiction. It highlights issues that are often misrepresented, if they are spoken about at all. Bluebaglife offers the perspectives of those held inside institutions, or are hiding away due to shame and stigma, as well as loved ones supporting them. Strong and motivated support networks are developing across a range of platforms, in the hope of awareness and social change.

Image credit: Claire Reddleman, Bars and Moss, 2018. Courtesy the artist

Nottingham Contemporary’s public programme is jointly funded by Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.

This event is at Nottingham Contemporary

Weekday Cross
Nottingham
NG1 2GB

0115 948 9750

www.nottinghamcontemporary.org

Sabrina Puddu and Francesco Zuddas will be chairing a session at the 2020 EAHN Conference. The conference, organised by the European Architectural History Network, will take place in June 2020 in Edinburgh. The call for contributions is now open and abstracts must be submitted by 20th September 2019.

Their session will seek contributions on the topic ‘Territories of incarceration: The project of modern carceral institutions as an act of rural colonisation’.

Full text of call (https://eahn2020.eca.ed.ac.uk/papers/) 

It can be argued that the modern prison is the locus where architecture tested its own entry into modernity. Through two fundamental archetypal diagrams – Carlo Fontana’s House of Correction in Rome (1704) and the Bentham brothers’s Penitentiary Panopticon (circa 1790) – the prison emerged as the paradigm of architecture’s ambition at shaping and directing human behaviour and relationships, which ultimately found synthesis in the modern model prison of Pentonville (London, 1840).

Scholarship on the architecture of incarceration has mostly focused its attention on urban compact prisons, of which Pentonville stands as the prototype. Robin Evans’s seminal study of modern reformism in British prisons (The Fabrication of Virtue, 1982) provided a detailed enquiry into the empowerment that architecture received by addressing the project of detention. Evans’ work sits alongside its contemporary and more celebrated companion, namely Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir (1975). Interestingly, the key to understand the argument of the two books seems to lay not as much in the analysis of detention inside urban compact prisons, but in what the two authors took as the ending point of their historical narratives: the opening of the Colonie Agricole at Mettray in France, which happened almost concomitantly to that of Pentonville, showing how the architectural codification of the carceral happened as much in the urban walled-prison as in a less restrictive parallel institution where the rational precision proper of the design of a prison was loosened (hence Foucault’s definition of ‘prisons boiteuse’ – limping prisons). The colony of Mettray served as the archetype for this new para-carceral type (the penal colony) that balanced its apparent uncertainty and benevolence by extending its scope of action towards vast territories and acting as an agent of rural colonisation that participated in the geopolitical project of the modern national states.

This session aims to collect insights into the architectural history of the modern penal colony intended as a specific declination of carceral institution that, besides the immediate role of confining, reforming, and punishing criminals, also took on an objective as an agent of territorial transformation and domestication of vast rural domains. Particular attention will be given to papers addressing the European territory and the role played by penal colonies in the processes of internal colonisation, as opposed to more usual explorations of imperial forms of colonisation. Shifting from the architectural to the territorial scale and covering a time-span from the mid-19th c. up to the WW2, contributions are sought that explore cases in which the project of penal colonies intersected with and facilitated the birth and acceptance of a new modern rural order across the European continent.

This session will be related to a monographic issue on penal colonies and the project of modern rural landscapes that is being discussed with the editors of the Journal of Architecture, for publication in 2020.

Sabrina Puddu, Royal College of Arts
Francesco Zuddas, Anglia Ruskin University

Contact : Sabrina Puddu,
Email : sabrina.puddu@rca.ac.uk

The Committee of the Carceral Geography Working Group of the RGS-IBG is delighted to announce that the 4th International Conference for Carceral Geography will take place in December 2020, in Brussels, Belgium. Hosted by the NICC (Nationaal Instituut voor Criminalistiek en Criminologie/Institut National de Criminalistique et de Criminologie), this will be the first conference in this series to be held outside of the UK. Provisional dates are 14-15 December 2020.

Organised by Christophe Mincke, Olivier Milhaud (Sorbonne U., Paris), Anouk Mertens, Dani Brutyn and Maria Larrañaga, and with a provisional theme of “Defining the carceral through space and movement” the 4th conference will be free to attend.

Watch this space for more information about the conference theme, keynote speaker, and in due course, a call for papers!

Sites of Conscience, as a global movement to reclaim and reinterpret places of human suffering and injustice as sites of memory, encourages reflection on how a geographically situated and specific set of past events have broader relevance to contemporary debates about democracy, human rights and social justice (Ševčenko 2010, 2011). Sites of conscience have emerged in response to diverse harms and injustices including institutional abuse, war, disappearance, environmental disaster, genocide, racial apartheid and labour exploitation.

This special issue of Space and Culture will bring together scholars, practitioners and activists to engage with sites of conscience who are interested in such sites in terms of social spaces. Editors Justine Lloyd (Sociology, Macquarie University, Australia) & Linda Steele (Law, University of Technology, Australia) are particularly interested in papers which consider how sites of conscience situate history, memory, politics, temporality, law, ethics and justice within a spatial framework.

They welcome abstracts engaging with sites of conscience including in the following contexts:

• Materiality and sites of conscience.
• Digital or otherwise spatially dispersed sites of conscience.
• Relationships between spatialities of sites of conscience and temporality, materiality, and affect.
• Sites of conscience in neoliberal times – privatisation, monetisation, gentrification, development.
• Sites of conscience, dark tourism and memorialisation.
• Cases for new sites of conscience not yet in existence, including in relation to current or emerging injustice and harm.
• Sites of conscience, colonialism, self-determination and Indigenous people.
• Sites of conscience and memorialisation in everyday or social spaces.
• Relationships between place and justice in sites of conscience.
• Relationships in sites of conscience between human rights, spatiality, materiality and place.
• Place as archive, evidence or judgment.
• Sites of conscience and ethical accountability in architecture, urban planning and heritage professions.

As well as engaging with the special issue’s theme all articles must (a) comply with the general submission requirements, (b) address the central concerns of the journal, which is to explore cutting-edge questions of spatiality and materiality by connecting conceptual analysis with empirical work (‘empirical’ being broadly construed), and (c) be of relevance to a wide international and multidisciplinary readership (see the Journal’s aims and scope).

Key dates:

• 1 September 2019: deadline for abstracts (500 words) and bios (200 words)
• October 2019: authors notified of outcome of abstracts and some invited to submit full article
• 1 July 2020: deadline for full articles of 7000 words (including references). Acceptance of an abstract is not a guarantee of publication.

The editors plan to host a workshop in Sydney, Australia related to the theme of the special issue in the first half of 2020. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to participate in the workshop in order to develop their articles for submission. Funding for travel for accepted authors will not be possible, but we welcome virtual
participation in the workshop.

Sites of conscience practitioners are encouraged to contact the editors if they are interested in submitting a shorter ‘praxis’ piece

Framing the Penal Colony

22-23 November 2019, Nottingham, UK

Call for Papers

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?

The organisers welcome proposals for papers or panels. 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

French-speaking carceral geographers will want to take a look at the new edition of ‘Criminologie‘, a special edition entitled ‘Les proches de personnes judiciarisées : expériences humaines et connaissances carcérales’ (Relatives of people under judicial investigation: human experiences and prison knowledge), guest-edited by Sandra Lehalle and including papers by:

Caroline Touraut (L’expérience carcérale élargie : une peine sociale invisible / The larger prison experience: An invisible social punishment);

Vanina Ferreccio (L’expérience de l’enfermement chez les proches de détenus. Une approche de l’extension des logiques carcérales / The experience of imprisonment on prisoners’ families. An approach to the expansionism of prison logics);

Gwenola Ricordeau («Faire son temps» et «attendre». Temporalités carcérales et temps vécu dedans et dehors / “Doing time” and “waiting”. Carceral rhythms and the experience of time inside and outside prison);

Dominique Laferrière (L’ambivalence de l’entourage des personnes délinquantes / 
The ambivalence of the relatives of individuals who offend)

Megan Sullivan (Les enfants de parents incarcérés aux États-Unis : une analyse qualitative / A Qualitative Analysis of Children whose Parents Are Incarcerated in the US)

Ariane Amado (Quelle place pour l’autre parent d’un enfant en prison? Une étude en droit comparé entre la France et l’Angleterre / Is there a place for the other parent of a child with lives with a parent in prison? A comparative legal study of France and England);

Sandra Lehalle and Mélissa Beaulieu (Le « rôle » de mères de détenus. Une maternité confrontée aux contraintes carcérales et aux attaques sociales / The role of mothers of prisoners. Blame, constraints, and daily adaptation);

Kaitlin MacKenzie («La seule constance… c’est l’inconstance» Les répercussions des faux positifs des scanneurs à ions sur les familles des détenus canadiens / ‘The only thing consistent…is the inconsistency’ The harmful effects of false positive ion scanner hits on families of Canadian prisoners);

Else Marie Knudsen (La curieuse invisibilité des enfants de détenus dans la politique canadienne de justice pénale / The curious invisibility of the children of prisoners in Canadian criminal justice policy);

Sophie de Saussure (Les effets de la peine sur les proches des contrevenants. Difficultés et discussion quant à leur problématisation lors de la détermination de la peine / The effects of punishment on the offenders’ relatives. Difficulties and discussion regarding their problematization at the sentencing stage);

and

Stacey Hannem (Déconstruire la stigmatisation des familles dans le discours sur les familles affectées par l’incarcération / Deconstructing Stigma in Discourse on Families Affected by Incarceration)

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