*With apologies for cross-posting*

 

 

The Social & Cultural Geographies Research Group at Northumbria University is delighted to announce its inaugural Annual Lecture:

 

Carceral Geography and Carceral Spaces: What is prison (not) for, and what can('t) it do?

 

Dr. Dominique Moran

Reader in Carceral Geography, University of Birmingham

 

 

Wednesday 9^th December 2015 at 5.30pm

There will be a reception with refreshments from 5pm

Room B0001, Ellison Building, Northumbria University, NE1 8ST

A campus map can be found here: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/media/738539/citycampus_map.pdf

Places are free, but limited, so please register here: http://northumbriacarceralgeographylecture.eventbrite.co.uk

 

Although prisons and criminal justice systems are integral parts of governance and techniques of governmentality, the geographical study of the prison and other confined or closed spaces is still relatively novel. The subdiscipline of carceral geography has established useful and fruitful dialogues with cognate disciplines of criminology and prison sociology, and is attuned to issues of contemporary import such as hyperincarceration and the advance of the punitive state. It has also used the carceral context as a lens through which to view concepts with wider currency within contemporary and critical human geography. Thus far, it has made key contributions to debates within human geography over mobility, liminality, and embodiment. Carceral geography brings to the study of prisons and imprisonment an understanding of relational space, as encountered, performed and fluid. Rather than seeing prisons as spatially fixed and bounded containers for people and imprisonment practices, through prison systems straightforwardly mappable in scale and distance, carceral geography has tended towards an interpretation of prisons as fluid, geographically-anchored sites of connections and relations, both connected to each other and articulated with wider social processes through and via mobile and embodied practices. Hence its focus on the experience, performance and mutability of prison space, the porous prison boundary, mobility within and between institutions, and the ways in which meanings and significations are manifest within fluid and ever-becoming carceral landscapes.

This lecture draws upon ongoing ESRC-funded research within the UK prison estate, to consider how the philosophical purposes of imprisonment are manifest in the built environment, and the ways in which the nature of carceral spaces affects the experience of incarceration.