Capturing Spaces: Thinking Through Apprehension and the Limits of Bodily Control
What can the
landscape of apprehension teach us about the spatialization of power? Bodily
capture, as the event that marks the first step in the detainment
process—indeed quite literally makes
the detainee—is frequently characterized by police departments and security
agencies as a discrete, singular point in space and time. This is evidenced by
the widespread use of capture rate studies and static point-of-capture maps. Yet
practices like ‘catch-and-release’, the exponential growth of controversial
techniques like ‘stop-and-frisk’, and the increasing use of kill/capture raids
in Afghanistan highlight capture as a diverse set of processes that require a
specific organization of space on both sides of the detention threshold.
This session will bring together papers that interrogate these fluid limits of detainment by drawing attention specifically to spaces, technologies, and techniques of bodily capture and to the myriad ways in which the spatial and temporal divisions between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of spaces of detention are organized, enabled, and performed.
Possible topics include (but are
of course not limited to) the following:
§ Evolving
techniques and technologies of targeting and capture
§ Military
detention and policing in conflict areas
§ Urban
surveillance, crowd management, and the policing of protest
§ Techniques
of description and classification
§ Tensions
between data-capture and bodily capture
§ The
threshold between spaces of circulation and sequestration; freedom and
un-freedom
§ Interfaces
between networked surveillance technology and detainment
§ Technologies
of calculation and risk mitigation in security operations
Please send enquiries
and/or abstracts to Rich Nisa: [log in to unmask]