This call for papers has now closed. Selection decisions (and allocation of bursaries) will be made by 31 August 2022, and notifications sent to the email address given for correspondence.

Call for papers

This year, the 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography will be held in Australia. This two-day hybrid event (in-person and online) will be hosted by the University of Melbourne, 14-15 December 2022. We invite individual or group presentations of scholarly, artistic or creative work that engages with one or more of the conference themes. We invite you to be part of this inclusive, engaged and engaging conference – a gathering of interdisciplinary scholars, students, practitioners, and people with lived experience of living/ working in confined settings – and to submit your abstract now. Abstract submissions close on 29 July 2022 – the deadline was extended to Friday 5 August 2022.

Conference theme

The conference theme for 2022 is Confinement: spaces and practices of care and control.

We aim to stimulate robust and thoughtful engagement with ideas and experiences of confinement across a diverse range of settings: from prisons and remand centres; immigration detention, border control and asylum; disability, aged care or children’s residential ‘care’ settings; places of human or non-human/animal captivity; to boundaries and borders created by law or conquest. We are keen to explore theoretical and experiential perspectives on inhabiting, living and working in places of confinement and to examine the uneasy tensions within and across diverse sites, settings, histories, logics and practices of care and control.

Within this broader theme we encourage reflection on and engagement with themes of:

• Diverse sites of confinement, intersections of ‘care’ and control
• Abolitionist perspectives on practices of coercive confinement and carcerality
• Elemental (air, water, land) and sensory aspects (sounds, smells) of confinement
• Art as a site/practice of resistance and/or memorialisation
• Intersections of human, non-human & animal captivity
• Historical sites of confinement, histories of violence
• Monitoring, oversight and accountability
• COVID, confinement and quarantine
• Settler colonialism and its legacies
• Time, temporalities, waiting
• …and other related themes and topics

We are also accepting proposals for thematic panels as well as individual paper presentations.

Travel bursaries

A small number of travel and accommodation bursaries are available for people without financial support who would like to attend the conference in person.

Submit your abstract

To propose a presentation or a panel, please complete the relevant abstract submission form – individual or panel. (Please download the form to your computer and edit it.)

Please return your completed form to carceral-geography22@unimelb.edu.au by 5 August 2022.

Selection decisions (and allocation of bursaries) will be made by 31 August 2022, and notifications sent to the email address given for correspondence.

Contact us

For more information, email carceral-geography22@unimelb.edu.au

Useful documents

You can also download this call for papers as a PDF: