The last few delegate places are still available for the first Carceral Geography Conference, to be held at the University of Birmingham on Tuesday 13th December 2016.
Abstract submission for this conference has now closed, but there are a handful of places remaining for delegates. Take a look at the conference programme, and register here.
See you in Birmingham in December!
The School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham is recruiting a new Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in Human Geography.
The successful candidate will join the Human Geography Research Group, which has four research subthemes: Geopolitics, transition and the carceral; Adapting to energy and environmental uncertainties; Bodies, landscapes, materialities; and Urban and regional studies.
It would be great to see carceral geographers apply for this position! More details here.
Informal enquiries can be directed to the Head of School, Professor Bill Bloss at w.j.bloss@bham.ac.uk; to Dr Julian Clark, research theme lead for Human Geography (j.r.a.clark@bham.ac.uk) or to Dominique Moran as Deputy Head of School at d.moran@bham.ac.uk
Call for Papers: 7th Nordic Geographers Meeting
Stockholm, Sweden, 18-21 June 2017
Session Title: Conceptualising a Trans-Species Carceral Geography
Convenors: Karen M. Morin (Bucknell University) & Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham)
Carceral geography has concerned itself with spaces of confinement very broadly conceived and operating at every scale from the global to the personal. Although incarceration has conventionally come to refer to the legal confinement of sentenced offenders under the jurisdiction of the state, the carceral has also come to be understood as embracing the myriad ways in which persons could be confined by other means – spaces of detention of refugees, noncitizens, asylum seekers, the trafficked and the renditioned – as well as embracing those ‘transcarceral’ spaces into which the more formally carceral constantly seeps. In this session we propose to engage with interpretations of ‘the carceral’ as also including spaces of non-human confinement. In so doing we bring together carceral geography and critical animal studies to engage with both human and nonhuman forms of confinement, enclosure, and captivity, be they state-sanctioned, quasi-legal, ad-hoc, illicit, spatially fixed, mobile, embodied or imagined, at various scales. What is it that makes us think of confinement of various kinds, human and nonhuman, as being carceral or not? The session’s objective is to think through what a trans-species carceral geography might be with a view to further consolidating the subdiscipline of carceral geography.
Please send an abstract (ca. 250 words) by Dec. 15, 2016 to Karen M. Morin (morin@bucknell.edu) and Dominique Moran (d.moran@bham.ac.uk). Decisions on papers will be made by January 15, 2017.
There is just one week left before the Call for Papers for this conference closes (at 8am UK time on Friday 4th October)!
Carceral Geography Conference 2016 at the University of Birmingham : Confinement, Crossings and Conditions
The School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham will host the first dedicated conference for Carceral Geography, on Tuesday 13th December 2016.
Call for Papers
Abstracts are invited for papers which address the themes of this conference: Confinement, Crossings and Conditions. These themes pertain to the nature and experience of carceral confinement, broadly interpreted; the notion of crossing of an assumed or contested boundary both between spaces of confinement and ‘other’ spaces, and to the ways in which carceral experiences persist after periods of custody have ended – both for those confined, and for affected others. During ESRC research projects to which the conference is linked, (focused on the experience of carceral spaces) issues of absence, intimacy, choreography and the microscale emerged as significant, and prospective speakers are invited to engage with (but are by no means limited to) these notions. Papers which discuss methodological or theoretical approaches for carceral geography, and those exploring the ‘place’ of carceral geography in relation to human geography / criminology / carceral studies more generally are also welcome.
Abstracts from postgraduate and early career researchers are particularly welcome.
As well as providing a forum for dissemination and discussion of new and recent research in carceral geography, this event is intended provide a ‘springboard’ for the development of an organisational structure for this subdiscipline: there will formal and informal opportunities to discuss and plan actions and activities around this topic.
A limited number of travel and accommodation bursaries will be available for paper presenters.
Please use this URL to:
If you are submitting an abstract, please note that the closing date to do so is 8am (UK time) on Friday 7th October. Selection decisions will be communicated by Friday 14th October.
The French journal Critique Internationale has just published a special issue on “Confinement and social categories”, edited by Tristan Bruslé and Bénédicte Michalon: http://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/fr/critique
“In the name of peacekeeping and of an effective organization of daily life inside carceral settings, confinement goes in pair with processes of categorisation through gender, ethnicity and religion. The papers presented here examine how confinement affects categorisation processes and social categories; and, reciprocally, how logics of classification are transformed, weakened or reinforced in carceral institutions. Indeed, the possibility of identifying, classifying and naming seems an effective management tool of the social relations and finally meets few resistances from categorised people – be they incarcerated or professionals working for/with the institution. Categories and categorisation processes are analysed here as disciplinary and normative procedures, being part of the power relationships in penal institution as well as in migrants’ camps and detention centres confinement settings for migrants.”
Contents:
Bénédicte Michalon, Tristan Bruslé : ‘Ethnicity, religion and gender in carceral institutions : processes and categorisation effects’
Aurore Mottet, ‘Distribution and Circulation: Categorizing Detainees in the Choucha Camp (Tunisia)’
Louise Tassin, ‘The Frontiers of Detention: Gender and Ethnicity in the Supervision of Foreigners Awaiting Expulsion’
Claire de Galembert, ‘The “radical”: A New, Ill-Defined Figure of Prison Danger’
Irene Becci, Mohammed Khalid Rhazzali, Valentina Schiavinato, ‘Perception and Experience of Religious Plurality in Swiss and Italian Prisons : An Ethnographic Approach’
Two of the leading scholars in carceral geography have put together a superb collection of essays in the Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy series, scrutinising the ideologies, policies and practices that enable the troubling, unparalleled and seemingly unbridled growth of immigration detention around the world.
In Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention an international collection of scholars provides crucial new insights into immigration detention, recounting at close range how detention’s effects ricochet from personal and everyday experiences to broader political-economic, social and cultural spheres. Contributors draw on original research in the US, Australia, Europe, and beyond to scrutinise the increasingly tangled relations associated with detention operation and migration management. With new theoretical and empirical perspectives on detention, the chapters collectively present a toolbox for better understanding the forces behind and broader implications of the seemingly uncontested rise of immigration detention.
Reviews:
‘This impressive and wide-ranging collection brings together leading scholars to expose the intimate economies, experiences, and processes that shape immigration detention. From the pocket money provided for asylum seekers in Danish detention centres, to the growing capacity of the detention estate across Europe, this collection traces a series of politically astute linkages between intimate experiences and global processes. By placing detention at the heart of contemporary migration, Conlon and Hiemstra have produced a volume that makes a critical intervention into debates over mobility, governance, and the politics of citizenship. In foregrounding the entangled relationships of detention, this volume contributes both a theoretically innovative focus on the intimate, whilst also calling attention to the political and ethical urgency of challenging detention across the world. Anyone interested in understanding the immigration detention industry, and in actively contesting it, will find inventive, insightful, and powerful resources in this book.’ — Jonathan Darling, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Manchester, UK
‘Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra have pulled together an astonishing collection of essays which focus on the intimate economies of immigration detention and shed light on the lived experiences of being detained in several countries. The wide geographic range presented in this collection is impressive and helps give the reader a sense of the extent to which immigration detention has become a global phenomenon. The collection is theoretically and empirically innovative, providing us both with new ways of thinking about the increasingly-common practice of detention as well as new insights into the significant physical and emotional toll detention takes on migrants’ lives. The editors creatively build on concepts of accumulation and dispossession to advance our conceptual understanding of the intimate economies of immigration detention. This important set of essays brings that which is often hidden – immigration detention – to light and does so in provocative ways. This book will be a critical addition to classes on immigration, political economy, and state repression. Moreover, anyone interested in migrant rights anywhere in the world should read this volume.’ — Tanya Golash-Boza, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Merced, US
‘Intimate Economies of Immigrant Detention powerfully brings to life the best of feminist theory by showing how and why the seemingly banal, the familiar, and the everyday matter—and matter in profound ways. From the price of toothpaste immigrant detainees are compelled to pay to humanitarian efforts to “improve” what are inherently dehumanizing detention practices, this invaluable volume illuminates the messy connections between political economic processes, state practices, and experiences imprisoned migrants endure. In doing so, the book demonstrates the simultaneous hardening of various boundaries and their increasing blurriness given the myriad connections that transcend and produce them, and that they reflect.’ — Joseph Nevins, Associate Professor of Geography, Vassar College, USA.
Carceral Geography Conference 2016 at the University of Birmingham : Confinement, Crossings and Conditions
The School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham will host the first dedicated conference for Carceral Geography, on Tuesday 13th December 2016.
Call for Papers
Abstracts are invited for papers which address the themes of this conference: Confinement, Crossings and Conditions. These themes pertain to the nature and experience of carceral confinement, broadly interpreted; the notion of crossing of an assumed or contested boundary both between spaces of confinement and ‘other’ spaces, and to the ways in which carceral experiences persist after periods of custody have ended – both for those confined, and for affected others. During ESRC research projects to which the conference is linked, (focused on the experience of carceral spaces) issues of absence, intimacy, choreography and the microscale emerged as significant, and prospective speakers are invited to engage with (but are by no means limited to) these notions. Papers which discuss methodological or theoretical approaches for carceral geography, and those exploring the ‘place’ of carceral geography in relation to human geography / criminology / carceral studies more generally are also welcome.
Abstracts from postgraduate and early career researchers are particularly welcome.
As well as providing a forum for dissemination and discussion of new and recent research in carceral geography, this event is intended provide a ‘springboard’ for the development of an organisational structure for this subdiscipline: there will formal and informal opportunities to discuss and plan actions and activities around this topic.
A limited number of travel and accommodation bursaries will be available for paper presenters.
Please use this URL to:
If you are submitting an abstract, please note that the closing date to do so is 8am (GMT) on Friday 7th October. Selection decisions will be communicated by Friday 14th October.
2016/17 brings new opportunities for discussion and development in carceral geography!
Hoping to continue in the tradition of a strong presence of research in carceral geography at American Association of Geographers (AAG) conferences since Washington DC in 2010, Austin Kocher, Nick Gill and I have just issued a Call for Papers for the AAG in Boston, MA to be held April 5-9 2017:
Global Carceral Geographies
Organizers
Austin Kocher (Ohio State University)
Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham)
Nicholas Gill (University of Exeter)
Confinement is on the move. In recent years, governments around the world have resorted to 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 to 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. We use the term confinement here as an ecumenical concept that aims to bring together the many sites (jails, prisons, detention centers, holding facilities, airplanes, buses, etc.) and practices (arrest, sentencing, solitary confinement, internal uprisings and resistance, abuse, deportation, parole) that shed light on the management of bodies.
Geographers have played a critical role in research on confinement, including the political economy of prisons (Bonds, 2009; Conlon & Hiemstra, 2017; Gilmore, 2007), the proliferation of immigrant detention (Loyd, Mitchelson, & Burridge, 2013; Martin, 2012; Moran, Gill, & Conlon, 2013; Mountz, 2011; Mountz, Coddington, Catania, & Loyd, 2013), affective and embodied life inside detention (Moran et al., 2013; Morin, 2013), historical geographies of confinement (Morin & Moran, 2015), and carceral mobilities (Peters & Turner, in press). A central theme of this work is that confinement is complex and heterogeneous, and it also reproduces power relations that exceed formal spaces of incarceration (Gill, Conlon, Moran, & Burridge, forthcoming). We aim to move this 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.
To this end, we invite papers on research related to carceral geographies for the AAG 2017. We are especially interested in ongoing and experimental research on new forms of incarceration, detention and resistance, both within and beyond carceral geography, including contributions from cognate disciplines (e.g. criminology, prison sociology and critical legal studies).
Possible themes include:
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Austin Kocher (kocher.51@osu.edu) by October 1, 2016 to be considered for the paper session. If we receive an excess of excellent proposals, we will consider expanding to more than one paper session.
Once your abstract is approved by the organizers, you will still need to register separately with the AAG website by October 27, 2016.
The 2017 AAG Annual Meeting will be held in Boston from April 5th through 9th. See http://www.aag.org/annualmeeting for more details.
On the UK side of the Atlantic, plans are in process for the first stand-alone conference for Carceral Geography, to be held at the University of Birmingham on 12-13th December 2016. Watch this space for more details and a Call for Papers!
Delighted to be invited to participate in this project….
Introduction: The Making Visible of Carceral Politics
Marijn Nieuwenhuis, University of Warwick
This symposium contains a rich collection of contributions based on the screening of the French documentary film Sur les Toits (“On the Roofs”). On a Wednesday in May 2016 I invited the film’s independent maker, Nicolas Drolc, and a number of academics from across Warwick’s humanities and social sciences to the screening of the movie. The result was a friendly and productive discussion on an important, but sometimes forgotten, episode in the history of incarceration (see, however, Zurn and Dilts 2016). The essays presented here comprise an interview with the director and a series of original reflections (from Dominique Moran, Sophie Fuggle, Anastasia Chamberlen, Oliver Davis and Stuart Elden) on both the film and its subject of investigation.
Sur les Toits (a title taken from a protest song of the French punk band…
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Prof Dominique Moran 
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