**Apologies for cross posting. Please find here details of a CfP for the RGS-IBG Conference 2019**.

The carceral offshore: unpacking geographies of detriment, intent and spatiality at sea Sponsored by the Carceral Geography Working Group (CGWG) of the RGS.

In examining geographies of trouble/geographies of hope at this year’s conference, it would be difficult for the seas and oceans not to come to mind. With recent, and also more longstanding, attention being drawn to both environmental and socio-cultural and political crisis (and so-called ‘crisis’) offshore (from threats to more-than-human ocean biodiversity and the perils of plastics, to the devastating human dimensions of oceanic migration and offshore detention) this session seeks to pay attention to the ways in which ‘carceral conditions’ (Moran, Turner and Schliehe, 2017) can be further unpacked at sea; and how in turn the sea becomes a space for further conceptualising the carceral. 

This session invites papers to explore a myriad of issues that connect up carcerality (broadly encapsulated by conditions of detriment, intent and spatiality, see Moran, Turner and Schliehe, 2017) and the seas (also broadly understood as relational, three-dimensional, multi-state and more-than-wet, see Peters and Steinberg 2019). Papers may be historical or contemporary in focus, empirically driven or conceptually led. 

Themes could include but are not limited to:

- ships (in their many and various types, from cruise liners to cargo ships to sailing vessels and prison hulks) as a carceral spaces/spaces of incarceration;

- the specific spaces within ships (from everyday spaces such cabins to engine rooms to safe rooms or panic rooms and on board holding cells) and their carceral conditions;

- the materiality of seas and oceans themselves as geophysical spaces of carcerality for those who live or work there or are forced to traverse these ‘water’ worlds; 

- the politics of demarcating, bordering and ordering the seas and oceans in ways that create carceral conditions for those using the seas;

- other ‘maritime’ spaces of incarceration - ports that connect land and sea; islands (from artificial to quarantine); exploratory platforms and rigs; fantasy spaces such as seasteads;

- specific maritime technologies that may have incarcerating effects such as submarines; dive wear and apparatus; maritime simulation machines in vessel handling training; nets and meshes etc. 

- the way more-than-human life/biodiversity at sea (from sea-going mammals, to fish, to micro organisms) become subject to carceral conditions through their relation to human use, exploitation and governance;

- how forms of offshoring might be examined as ‘carceral’ (for example the offshoring of activities and people which/who are constructed as ‘other’);

- how forms of ocean mapping and planning might have incarcerating impacts for people, ecosystems, more-than-human life and relations between these.

If you would be interested in participating, please get in touch and send abstracts of no more 200 words to Kimberley Peters ([log in to unmask]) and Jennifer Turner ([log in to unmask]) by 8^th February 2019.