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

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)

Two short-term research assistants are sought by the School of Design at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) to work with Rosemarie Fitton for 10 hours per week for 20 weeks on a project looking at prison environments.

Over the past two years Rosemarie’s team have developed a reputation for the delivery of innovative student design solutions for prison Visits Centres, providing design solutions that facilitate positive relationships in a more friendly and humane environment, delivering positive outcomes for both visitors and prisoners.

The advertised posts would be working on a new project that intends to capture not only the research that has already been undertaken in this area, but also to build on the experience and acumen developed through active design practice. This, coupled with research conducted with prisoners and visitors about their experiences of visits centres, will provide an evaluation of the success of interventions already implemented, enrich the research data and feed into future design projects.

Duties will include preparation of a literature review, data generation (via interviews) and data analysis.

Further details of the posts are available on the UniTemps website at https://www.unitemps.com/Search/JobDetails/21836. The intended start date is applications is 25 March 2019, and applications are invited as soon as possible.

 

Call for Papers – ESC Conference 2019
Ghent – 18-21 September 2019 https://www.eurocrim2019.com

Title: What does carceral geography bring to carceral studies?

Session Organisers: Christophe Mincke (Institut national de criminalistique et de criminologie / Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles) and Anna Schliehe (University of Cambridge)

The term ‘carceral geography’ (Moran et al 2011) describes a vibrant field of geographical and space-centred research into practices and institutions of incarceration, ranging from prisons to migrant detention facilities and beyond. Although rapid, its development is far outpaced by the expansion, diversification and proliferation of those strategies of spatial control and coercion towards which it is attuned. The dictionary definition of carceral is ‘relating to, or of prison’, but as Routley notes ‘carceral geography is not just a fancier  name for the geography of prisons’ (2016: 1). Carceral geography is in close dialogue with  longerstanding academic engagements with the carceral, most notably criminology and prison sociology. Dialogue initially comprised learning and borrowing from criminology, but within a more general criminological engagement with spaces and landscapes (Campbell, 2013; Hayward, 2012, 2016; Kindynis, 2014) recent years have seen criminologists increasingly considering and adopting perspectives from carceral geography. We call for continued interrogation of carceral conditions (Moran et al 2017).
In this session we want to continue this dialogue and critically engage with questions around what a spatial focus can bring to carceral studies.

How do spatial approaches help to:
• understand the new challenges the prison is confronted with?
• define the carceral within or outside walls?
• better understand the functioning of carceral institutions?
• raise new questions for the century-old prison?

Please send abstracts of max 200 words, giving names, institutional affiliation and contact details for authors/presenters, to Anna (aks79@cam.ac.uk) and Christophe (christophe.mincke@just.fgov.be) by no later than 5th of April 2019.

The new year has brought a crop of great new – and very different – papers (many of which are open access) that the CGWG wanted to bring to the attention of carceral geographers and others interested in scholarship of carceral spaces. Happy reading!

First, the whole of Stuckness and Confinement: Reflections on Life in Ghettos, Camps and Prisons , 2019’s first Issue of Ethnos, is well worth a read. In their Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement, Andrew Jefferson, Simon Turner and Steffen Jensen make clear the appeal of this special issue to carceral geographers, as they develop “a theoretical argument around the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement by exploring the relationships between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and the like with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape”. They elegantly navigate the diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings of and interests in confinement, and their own approach resonates with work in carceral geography, which they note is “concerned with multiple sites considering specifically the analytical entwining of imprisonment and migrant detention and with the subjective experiences of confinement”.

Focusing on different types of spaces, three new papers consider the lived experience of confinement, using different conceptual framings, and diverse data sources.

First, looking at secure forensic psychiatric units, Paula Reavey, Steven D Brown, Ava Kanyeredzi, Laura McGrath and Ian M. Tucker’s paper Agents and spectres: Life-space on a medium secure forensic psychiatric unit just out in Social Science & Medicine, examines how forensic psychiatric environments contribute to the shaping of recovery, by examining key features such as social interactions and agency. Drawing connections between the design of forensic psychiatric spaces and prisons, they use a concept of life space to explore the idea that occupants of these spaces “engage with the built environment in terms of it how shapes relationality”. They note that “markers of detention, such as locked door and high walls, may not necessarily act as the limits of psychological space”, if relationships to others can be maintained through porous boundaries, and that “freedom of movement…, such as the use of outside spaces and communal areas, might well diminish rather than expand a sense of agency” if relational possibilities are not enhanced. They argue that the built environment “should… be explored from the perspective of the relationally defined life space of the patient, rather than in terms of its spatial affordances only”.

Next, drawing on research in asylum detention, Marielle Zill, Ilse van Liempt, Bas Spierings and Pieter Hooimeijer have published Uneven geographies of asylum accommodation: Conceptualizing the impact of spatial, material, and institutional differences on (un)familiarity between asylum seekers and local residents in Migration Studies. Considering variation in asylum accommodation at the level of the everyday, they argue that “more ‘open’ forms of asylum accommodation may foster familiarity between asylum seekers and local residents through the development of closer everyday social relations, and more ‘closed’ forms of asylum accommodation may enforce feelings of unfamiliarity by strengthening processes of categorization and everyday bordering” Differentiating between ‘spatial’, ‘material’ and ‘institutional’ dimensions of openness of asylum accommodation, they “aim to understand ‘(un)familiarity’ as expression of people’s experiences, knowledge and perceptions of social distance”. 

Thirdly, drawing on literary representations of the prison, Anna Kędra-Kardela and Aleksandra Kędzierska have published a fascinating paper in Roczniki Humanistyczne, “From the Profane to the Sacred: Prison-Space Transformations in G.G. Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon” and O. Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”” in which they use the concept of ‘story space’ to argue that the changing perception of space in these poems reflects a spiritual transformation for their protagonists. In the first poem, they argue, the experience of confinement leads the protagonist to the acceptance of prison life to the point of the dungeon becoming “a second home”, whereas in the second, incarceration has a transformative function, culminating in spiritual awakening. As a result, prison “becomes a space of prayer, turning thereby from the profane into the sacred”. 

And finally, the prison system of California feels familiar to carceral geographers, following the seminal work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, but in California’s First Mass Incarceration System: Franciscan Missions, California Indians, and Penal Servitude, 1769–1836, published in Pacific Historical Review, Benjamin Madley offers a perspective which will be new to many. Arguing that California’s missions came to resemble a mass incarceration system, he examined the “changing policies of recruitment, spatial confinement, regimentation, surveillance, physical restraint, and corporal punishment as well as California Indian resistance” to trace the ways in which missions and their military allies deployed carceral practices. He argues persuasively that “colonial-era carceral systems may have contributed to the evolution of local penal institutions as well as the long history of incarceration in the United States as a whole”.

Taken together, these diverse and intriguing papers offer much to reflect upon for carceral geographers and others interested in the theorisation of confinement, the development and design of carceral systems and institutions, and their lived experience. Looking forward to much more fascinating work like this in 2019!