Carceral Seas: Containment, Contestation and Crime Offshore convened by Jennifer Turner and Kimberley Peters (University of Liverpool)
With recent, and also more longstanding, attention being drawn to both environmental and socio-cultural and political crises (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 ‘Carceral Seas’ – interrogating the various carceral characteristics and conditions of offshore worlds.
This session, building on a panel at the RGS-IBG Conference 2019, invites papers to continue exploring 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]).
We are interested in papers that explore the politics of modes of containment (of people, activities, sea-life, aquaculture) that occur at sea; the contested/contestable nature of containment and of achieving justice at sea in the face of overlapping jurisdictions offshore; and the ways in which seas are spaces of crime (committed by people against human and more-than-human life and environments, spanning across generations, times, spaces and spheres of land, sea and sky).
Papers in this session may examine, but are not limited to:
– the contested politics of demarcating, bordering and ordering the seas and oceans in ways that create carceral conditions/containment for those using the seas (via modes of governance, planning or policy);
– 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;
– ships (in their many and various types, from cruise liners to cargo ships to sailing vessels and prison hulks) as spaces of containment/for committing or preventing crime;
– 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 ability to confine;
– other ‘maritime’ spaces of contested containment and crime – 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, confining, conditions or crime through their relation to human use, exploitation and governance;
– how carcerality may be experienced on the scale of the nation-state to the local level through conditions of neoliberal bartering where offshore resources and zones are ‘sold off’ via detrimental deals with global business;
– how forms of ocean mapping and planning might be perceived as having incarcerating/containing impacts for people, ecosystems, more-than-human life and relations between these.
Please send abstracts of no more 250 words to Kimberley Peters (kimberley.peters@liverpool.ac.uk), Jennifer Turner (jennifer.turner@liverpool.ac.uk) by Friday 25th October 2019. Details about attending the conference are available from the AAG website: https://www2.aag.org/aagannualmeeting/
Dr. Jennifer Turner 