Research News

Undergraduate Dissertation Prize 2022 Announcement

/ lmartin

The Carceral Geographies Working Group and Advisory Board are pleased to announce the winner of our 2022 Undergraduate Dissertation Prize:

Flora Farthing, Durham University: “Re-entry as ‘Punishment’s twin’: An exploration of the contemporary post-release carceral environment.”

We wish to congratulate all nominees for producing excellent dissertations under very challenging circumstances. The selection panel was impressed by the depth and care with which these students treated their research, their engagement with carceral geography literatures, and the insights they drew from their rich empirical research. These dissertations presented us with the best of undergraduate research and the decision was a difficult one.

The review panel was especially impressed with Flora’s methodology and, especially, the richly detailed analysis of people’s experiences of re-entry. Combined with her engagement with multiple facets of carceral geographies literature, Flora’s analysis generated original insights about the diffusion of carcerality beyond prisons. The review committee felt that these insights have the potential to contribute to emerging work exploring carcerality beyond detention and show the ability to engage in cutting-edge research. Congratulations, Flora.

Dissertation abstract:

Abstract: Situated within the prevailing environment UK of high rates of incarceration, this dissertation explores the re-entry experiences of former offenders. Highlighting the extent to which the carceral is continuously felt and re-enforced, through various institutional and societal practises and spaces, despite their release from prison. Whilst also illuminating the relationship between the pervasive nature of the carceral within society and the carceral ‘churn’ which is prevalent within the contemporary UK environment; encapsulating the revolving nature of incarceration. This dissertation presents the potential of penal voluntary organisations as a ‘glimmer’ of hope within the bleak re-entry landscape, supporting former offenders and subsequently aiding in their disentanglement from the pervasive carceral webs that emanate from institutional and societal means of control.

Registration Open for the 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography

/ Jen Turner

We share the exciting news that registration is now open for the 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography – a hybrid conference (in-person and online) in Melbourne, Australia on 13-15th December 2022!

The conference is hosted by the University of Melbourne and supported by the Carceral Geography Working Group (CGWG) of the Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG).

This year’s conference theme is Confinement: spaces and practices of care and control. The conference will be an inclusive, engaged and engaging gathering of interdisciplinary scholars, students, practitioners and people with lived experience of living and working in confined settings.

It will feature 26 themed paper sessions, 5 keynote plenary sessions as well as a creative program of works (online and face-to-face) and a variety of networking opportunities.

Conference registration is free for those without financial support. We invite others to contribute whatever they are able to. Registration contributions will be used to support bursaries for ECR presenters to future International Conferences for Carceral Geography.

Register now at: https://icmsmeetings.eventsair.com/5th-international-conference-for-carceral-geography/registration/Site/Register

For more information, please visit our conference website

Any questions please email:

carceral-geography22@unimelb.edu.au

CFC: (In)Secure Worlds: Scales, Systems and Spaces of Carcerality

/ Jen Turner

Hanneke Stuit, Jennifer Turner and Julienne Weegels have been invited by Duke University Press to submit a proposal for an edited collection on carcerality in a globalized world for their Global Insecurities book series.

If you are interested in contributing to this interdisciplinary collection, please submit an abstract of 250-300 words, a proposed chapter title and a short bio of 80 words by 30 November 2020. The envisioned chapters are approximately 6000-8000 words. Please make sure your proposed work fits the rationale of the collection.

Scales, Systems and Spaces of Carcerality

Carceral systems have expanded over the past decades as strategies accompanying the many ‘wars on’ crime, drugs, poverty, and terrorism. These systems serve to securitize, isolate, manage and police specific groups of criminalized others. In effect, the carceral has become such an inextricable aspect of current security paradigms that scientists speak of a carceral age and carceral states (Moran et al. 2018, Garland 2013, Wacquant 2000). Carceral forms, then, do not just influence those who come into daily contact with the prison.

Following Moran et al. (2018) and their conceptualization of carceral conditions, spaces that exist as performances and practices of carcerality exist in various guises and on various scales around the globe. Such spaces are both manifestations of top-down practices of securitization (such as the implementation and persistence of the immigration detention center or the control of territories through the hardening and deepening of border technologies) and emergent from or attributed to the micro-scale level of the body of the individual (such as the relationship between the home as a carceral space for domestic abuse sufferers or the disproportionate treatment of people of color on the job market).

Such manifestations are enacted through government legislation and infrastructures of sanction and control, but carcerality also ‘seeps’ into everyday spheres in different ways. Popular culture abounds with representations of the prison, for instance, and ecological concerns are making it increasingly difficult to think of an abstract “outside” to human experiences from which one can escape. Whether in material, spatial, discursive and imaginary guises, experiences and feelings of confinement are becoming increasingly commonplace, although they do so in unequally gendered and racialized ways (Alexander 2012, Browne 2015). Accordingly, then, we are living in what might be considered a ‘carceral world’, where practices, performances, spatialities, imaginaries, and experiences of carcerality are widespread and exist in a variety of scales.

This edited collection seeks to explore the complex workings of global immobilization and securitization in a number of different ways. What makes a carceral space? How might experiences and imaginations of carceral spaces be contingent upon both people and place? And, how has carcerality come to emerge as a central construction of life in our globalized world? In what ways do technologies of incarceration and securitization, legal and regulative apparatus, and economic systems impact who and what is imbricated in experiences and imaginations of carcerality? How do these practices manifest in various geographical locations and at different scales? What are the likely ongoing impacts of living in a carceral world? Ultimately, what systems of power shape notions of carcerality and what does this mean for better understanding methods of incarceration, as well as the wider politics of spaces that might be considered carceral? These are the questions central to this timely edited collection, (In)Secure Worlds: Scales, Systems and Spaces of Carcerality.

Accordingly, chapters are sought that serve to:

  • Deploy carcerality to make visible the intersections between prison conditions, colonialism and the capitalist system. Where concepts like surveillance, security and (im)mobility crucially focus on strategies and technologies of what Bigo calls professional population management (2008), the concept of carcerality helps to account for the historical and social constructions of extraction that drive connections between prisons, colonialism and the capitalist system (Fludernik 2019). In doing so carcerality explicates and makes visible the constructed nature of punishment and punitive desires in contemporary entanglements of security and capitalist labor. Under what conditions has carcerality developed and what systems continue to perpetuate its existence? How may understanding the intersections between carcerality and other world systems serve to disrupt these relationships?
  • Focus attention on the role of carcerality in spatial organization. As Moran et al. (2018) have noted, Foucault thinks the carceral as reverberating rings that disseminate discipline and self-surveillance throughout society. However, the prototypical carceral institutions he mentions, like orphanages, reformatories, disciplinary battalions, alms houses, workhouses, and factory-convents have largely waned or changed. What, then, are the carceral institutions and spaces in our current epoch and how does an analysis of those spaces help us to better understand carcerality now?
  • Open up analysis of specific conditions, experiences and imaginaries of incarceration. The word carceral, as denoting what pertains to the prison and to what is prison-like, allows for an analysis of how carceral conditions are repeated and recreated in spaces outside the prison. Although an overreliance on metaphors of carcerality risks glossing the experiences of imprisoned people, the concept also has the power to address the relays and slippages that occur in the feedback loops between on-site prison experiences and broader and more global carceral processes, like prison imaginaries in popular culture, the design of prison cells, and the globalization of prison governance regimes. Frequently, these processes rely on gendered, classed, and racialized experiences and ideas. The collection encourages contributions that allow for a better understanding of the prison itself as well as its broader influence in contemporary societies. How do particular experiences and ideas of gender, class and race shape and how are they shaped by the politics and aesthetics of incarceration?
  • Conceptualise carcerality in ways that facilitate analysis of structures of feeling associated with incarceration. The carceral’s ability to metaphorically (re)cast issues and ideas in terms of the prison highlights structures of feeling (Williams 1975) about the carceral that circulate socially (Fludernik 2005; Ahmed 2004). This begs the question why carceral metaphors pop up as frequently as they do outside the prison, what they are used for exactly and to what emotional and political effects? How is or can carcerality be embodied and performed? When is an experience carceral, and what does such a denotation help us see about the structures and experiences of present day precarity?

Contributions are not limited by discipline or geographical focus. Proposals from scholars from all career stages are encouraged. Proposals from non-Anglophone contexts are welcomed and editorial support will be given.

The following timescale for the volume is anticipated. Please note this in submitting your abstract for consideration:

– First submission of chapters to the editors required by 30thJune 2021.

– Final submission of revised chapters to the editors by 31st December 2021.

If you have any further questions, please contact the editors by email at:

h.h.stuit@uva.nl

jennifer.turner@uni-oldenburg.de

j.h.j.weegels@uva.nl

Global Carceral Geographies at the AAG2017

/ carceralgeography

The 2017 AAG (American Association of Geographers) conference takes place next week (5-9 April)  in Boston, and there will be four sessions on carceral geography.

Confinement is on the move. In recent years, governments around the world have resorted to deploying 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 for 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. Geographers have played a critical role in research on confinement, including: the political economy of prisons, the proliferation of immigrant detention, the affective and embodied life inside detention, historical geographies of confinement, and the prevalence of mobile carceral networks. We aim to move existing 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.

1205 Global Carceral Geographies I: Carceral Experiences is scheduled on Wednesday, 5th April , from 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM in Room 105, Hynes, Plaza Level.

In this session, we focus specifically on how people experience incarceration as a spatial technology of power. The session features papers from:

Anna Schliehe, Dr – University of Cambridge Dialogues across carceral space: comparative research and the case of penal exceptionalism

Anaïs Tschanz – University of Montreal Carceral (im)mobilities and inmate experience of distance in the Canadian province of Quebec.

Nicolas Sallée – Université de Montréal Imprisoned rehabilitation? The carceral nature of a Quebec secure juvenile facility.

Jennifer Turner – University of Liverpool; Dominique Moran – University of Birmingham; Yvonne Jewkes – University of Brighton Serving time with a sea view: escaping prison via therapeutic blue space

1405 Global Carceral Geographies II: Carceral Societies is scheduled on Wednesday 5th April from 12:40 PM – 2:20 PM in Room 105, Hynes, Plaza Level

In this session, we focus specifically on incarceration and the management of confined bodies as an endemic symptom of social violence. The session features papers from:

Olivier Milhaud – University Paris-Sorbonne, UMR ENeC CNRS A theoretical framework for confinement (prisons, distance, discontinuities, France)

Julie De Dardel – University of Geneva Ethics in and after the field in prison research

1505 Global Carceral Geographies III: Confining the Other is scheduled on Wednesday 5th April from 2:40 PM – 4:20 PM in Room 105, Hynes, Plaza Level

In this session, we focus specifically on the role of confinement in creating and reinforcing notions of geographic, legal, and social “otherness”. The session features papers from:

Lauren Martin – Durham University The Carceral Mobilities of Cash: Outsourcing, Digital Surveillance, and Refused Asylum-seeker Assistance in the United Kingdom

Leigh Barrick – University of British Columbia Separating families to maintain family unity, and other paradoxes of U.S. deterrence policy

Austin Kocher – The Ohio State University, Department of Geography The Legal Construction of Space: On the Juridical Relationship Between Immigrant Detention, Immigration Courts, and Border Enforcement in the United States

Adam Joseph Barker – University of Leicester Carcerality and Indigeneity: the roots of ‘Indian territory’ in Turtle Island (North America)

1605 Global Carceral Geographies IV: Carceral Intersections is scheduled on Wednesday 5th April, from 4:40 PM – 6:20 PM in Room 105, Hynes, Plaza Level.

In this session, we focus specifically on the intersections between incarceration and other forms of political power and social control. The session features papers from:

Emma Marshall – University of Exeter Investigating the possibilities of online activism as a challenge to carceral space

Jesse Proudfoot – Durham University Scaling Addiction

Odilka Sabrina Santiago – Binghamton University  Predictive Policing and the Transformation of Carceral Space: Promotes, rather than, Prevents Violence

Christophe Mincke – National Institute for Forensic Science and Criminology From confinement to monitoring. The carceral as management of the transitory

Elsewhere in the program, carceral geographers will also surely be interested to attend:

2492 PREM: The Daily Life of Police Violence on Thursday, 6th April, from 1:20 PM – 3:00 PM in Provincetown, Marriott, Fourth Floor

3192 PREM: Racialized State Power and the Problem of Reform on Friday, 7th April, from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM in Provincetown, Marriott, Fourth Floor

and

3492 PREM: A Roundtable on Prisons, Racism, Empire, Militarism
on Friday, 7th April 2017, from 1:20 PM – 3:00 PM in Provincetown, Marriott, Fourth Floor

…and papers from…

Brett Story, Post-Doctoral Fellow – CUNY Graduate Center  The Prison in the City

Vanessa Anne Massaro, PhD – Bucknell University  “In and outta jail”: State reliance on family support networks through prisons’ revolving door

Shaul Cohen – University of Oregon Transcending Space, Embracing Time: Geographic Imagination From Within a Prison

Madeleine Hamlin – Syracuse University Second Chances in the Second City: Mapping Chicago’s Carceral Continuum

Jen Bagelman,- Exeter University Subterranean Detention & Sanctuary from below

Richard Nisa – Fairleigh Dickinson University Laboratories of Enemy Behavior: Cold War Social Science and the Korean War Prison

Bella Robinson – CoyoteRI, and Elena Shih – Brown University Policing Modern Day Slavery: Sex Work and the Carceral State in Rhode Island

 

 

 

New book! Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention (Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra)

/ carceralgeography

intimate-economies-coverTwo 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

/ carceralgeography

Carceral Geography Conference 2016 at the University of Birmingham : Confinement, Crossings and Conditionsaston webb

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:

  • Register to attend as a speaker, and submit your abstract
  • Register to attend as a non-presenting delegate

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.

 

Carceral Geography Conferencing

/ carceralgeography

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:

  • the institutional convergences and divergences of detention and incarceration
  • confinement outside of the Anglophone world
  • uprisings and internal resistance
  • carceral circuitry
  • family and childhood detention
  • confinement in historical perspective
  • carceral mobilities
  • related institutions: courts, police, parole, sheriffs, border patrol
  • neoliberal prison reform
  • identity and social difference
  • LGBTQ+ issues and resistance
  • private for-profit economies
  • emotional and affective experiences of incarceration
  • geographies of cradle-to-prison pipelines
  • prison architecture and design
  • exporting and importing confinement
  • alternatives to confinement
  • theoretical and methodological approaches to carceral geographies

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!

Criminological Encounters – call for papers for new journal

/ carceralgeography

Carceral geographers may be interested to submit papers for the inaugural issue of the new free open-access journal Criminological Encounters,  a new international, interdisciplinary and open-access journal that aims to facilitate critical dialogues between scholars of criminology and interlocutors in other social, academic, and professional domains about contemporary issues of crime, harm, violence, in/justice, security, law, and society.

The editors have published the following invitation for submissions for Issue 1: “Introducing Criminological Encounters”

“Criminology is famously described as a rendezvous discipline: a meeting place for the established disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, as well as the exact and natural sciences. At the same time criminology can be considered as a self-established, standalone discipline with transdiciplinary origins. The underdetermined character of criminology in these times of heightened sensitivities to issues of crime and in/security makes it a challenging but also exciting field of study. This journal understands criminology as a discipline of encounters: encounters both in the sense of constructive dialogues as well as confrontations around given subjects. These confrontations are at times intellectual in nature, and at others are more explicitly political. This journal also considers criminology as not only the science for the study and understanding of crime and its causes and consequences but also as a discipline that is dedicated to research on conflicts and other social issues from a holistic perspective.

Forthcoming issues within Criminological Encounters will focus on thematic topics and feature competing and complimentary perspectives around these themes. This could be, for example, an encounter between criminologists and sociologists, or between health scholars and nutritionists on the topic of “food in prison”. It could be an encounter between criminologists and urban sociologists, geographers and urban studies scholars on topics like “conflict in public spaces”, “border control and crimmigration”, “electronic monitoring”, “youth delinquency”, and so on.

The journal is, however, not limited to interdisciplinary dialogues but also includes debates between scientists and practitioners (e.g. criminology scholars and law enforcement agents), between criminologists from the “Global North” and criminologists from the “Global South”, or between different criminological methodologies (e.g. qualitative versus quantitative) and theoretical schools of thought (e.g. Foucauldian versus Marxist). Many different encounters are thus possible.”

While the issues of this journal will focus on thematic topics, its very first issue, scheduled for publication in fall 2016, will take its title “Criminological Encounters” as the subject of scrutiny.  Both theoretical reflections and empirical contributions that are in line with, but not limited to, the following themes, will be welcome:

  • The dialogues between criminology and given disciplines: e.g. criminology and geography, criminology and law, criminology and political science, criminology and philosophy;
  • The dialogues between criminology scholars and practitioners: e.g. criminology and law enforcement agents, criminology and policy makers;
  • The encounter between competing research methods: e.g. qualitative versus quantitative approaches in criminology;
  • The encounter between competing theories or between different schools of thought: e.g. critical versus positivistic criminology; American versus European criminology; criminology from the “Global South” and criminology from the “Global North”;
  • The essence of criminology as a standalone discipline amid its different multidisciplinary influences;
  • Criminology as the science for the studies of conflicts;
  •  “Criminological encounters”: authors are invited to present other possibilities of interpretation of such encounters;

The editors appeal to authors from different disciplinary backgrounds who – given their research subjects – are seeking a dialogue with criminology. These encounters between different intellectual school of thoughts and competing paradigms set the stage for intra- or interdisciplinary dialogues about an array of topics. And it is exactly these conversations that we set out to present in this journal.

Submission

Submissions in English of a minimum of 6,000 and a  maximum of 9,000 words (notes and bibliographic references included) should be sent before May 22nd, 2016 through the online submission link. All articles will pass a double blind review process and authors can expect feedback on their submission within 3 months. The journal will not charge any submission fee.

Carceral Geography at the IGU2016, Beijing

/ carceralgeography

Rethinking Carceral Geography in ‘Harmonised Societies’

The 33rd International Geographical Congress (IGC) of the International Geographical Union (IGU) will be held in Beijing, China, on 21-25
August 2016.

Claudio Minca and Chin-Ee Ong are seeking papers for their session on Rethinking Carceral Geography in ‘Harmonised Societies’ organised under the IGU Political Geography Commission (C.33). Their call is as follows:

***

In recent years, geographers have contributed to the understanding of spaces of surveillance, violence and control (Moran, 2015; Philo, 2012) and
have located such geographical inquiries in camps (Minca & Ong, 2015; Minca, 2015), prisons (Minca & Ong, 2015) and inmate transportation (Moran, Piacentini, & Pallot, 2012). This session first seeks to rethink the role of carceral geography within the context of discourses endorsing and promoting reconciliation and harmony in society. Specifically, we ask whether carceral spaces and notions and practices of control, discipline and punishment have a place in what may be termed ‘harmonious societies’ historically, at present, and in the future. While the notion of ‘harmonious societies’ may have found currency and usage in discourses articulated by politicians, its tendencies towards non-antagonistic consensus presents critical questions for carceral spatialities. Should a harmonious society preserve and remember its past spaces of discipline and violence? What role do current and future carceral spaces play in a harmonious society (if at all)? Are control, discipline and detention key functions for a harmonious society?

We are therefore interested in papers engagging with the following sub-themes:

· Reconceptualising the ‘carceral’ and the ‘carceral spaces’;

· The biopolitics of detention;

· Spatial technologies of incarceration;

· Geographies of detention, custody and care;

· Control, surveillance and society;

· Prisons, asylums, camps and quasi-carceral spatialities.

· ‘Carceral spaces’ after the prison:

· Post-carceral politics of memory, forgetting and representation;

· Post-carceral geographies of heritage and of tourism;

· The power of place: cultural histories of past spatialities of violence.

Enquiries regarding the session may be directed to Chin-Ee Ong (geooce@nus.edu.sg) or Claudio Minca (claudio.minca@wur.nl). Please submit abstracts of not more than 250 words through the conference website at http://www.igc2016.org/dct/page/70047.

The deadline is Monday, 15 February 2016. Please note that: (i) titles should consist of no more than 20 words; (ii) no abbreviations are to be
used in titles; and (iii) please be sure to include no more than 10 key words. We will get in touch regarding acceptance by 16 April 2016.

*Panel Conveners:*

Professor Claudio Minca, Wageningen University, the Netherlands (claudio.minca@wur.nl) and

Dr Chin-Ee Ong, National University of Singapore, Singapore, (geooce@nus.edu.sg).

PhD opportunity in Carceral Geography

/ carceralgeography

PhD opportunity in Carceral Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK, to start October 2016; deadline for applications February 2016.

Architectural Geographies of the UK Custodial Estate

Supervisors: Dr Dominique Moran and Professor Peter Kraftl

This PhD engages with the UK’s Government Soft Landings (GSL) scheme, and the utilisation of Building Information Modelling (BIM), within the UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ), for the construction of new justice buildings (police stations, courts, prisons). It builds on research at GEES in carceral and architectural geographies; extending inquiry into geographies of incarceration, and drawing attention to ‘banal’ rather than ‘signature’ buildings, whilst emphasising a need to understand how policies, procedures and procurement practices affect how buildings are designed and delivered. GSL seeks to ensure that new public buildings deliver to their brief, and that lessons learned from their construction are effectively captured. It seeks better outcomes for built assets, smoothing transition from construction into use. UK public sector procurers are mandated to adopt BIM, a form of Computer Aided Design, in all public sector construction projects by March 2016. BIM is intended to streamline project management, interaction between supply chain members, and enable leaner project delivery. Planned for a particular ‘moment’ in the evolution of public sector construction, the project will examine the implementation of GSL and the adoption of BIM within the MoJ, an early adopter of GSL.

The PhD will speak to notions of ‘future geographies’, anticipation and preparedness; the ‘future-proofing’ element of GSL/BIM. It will also explore the links between design, construction, maintenance and use, and the relational, processual nature of building work, as well as interrogating the role of architects in introducing design, innovation, and creativity into the technical processes of GSL/BIM. The PhD also has the potential to advance theory, considering the spatiotemporal terms which might be deployed to understand buildings as ‘more-than events’, building on a recent anti-Deleuzian turn against events and relationality in some recent philosophies of materiality, and perhaps, therefore, constitute a challenge to and development of geographies of architecture and carceral geographies.

This PhD project is founded on close contact with the external partner, with a professional placement augmented by regular contact with MoJ, supply chain partners and other relevant parties with a focus on custodial construction programme and delivery of GSL tasks.

UK and EU applicants may be able to enter the competition for ESRC scholarships at the University of Birmingham. A separate application is required for the funding competition, deadline in February. Applicants interested in applying for such funding must contact the named supervisor – d.moran@bham.ac.uk – and apply for PhD study at Birmingham well ahead of this deadline. Link.