Dr. Jennifer Turner

CfP for the 2021 RGS Annual International Conference: Carcerality of and/or on the border convened by Anna Schliehe (University of Cambridge) and Jennifer Turner (University of Oldenburg)

Borders are often carceral apparatus – that is apparatus that have incarcerating and exclusionary qualities – of bounding, containing, confining and restricting people and place. Likewise, carcerality – as a now established term used in subfields of the discipline – is concerned intimately with border regimes and politics through practices of spatiality, detriment and intent (Moran et al. 2018). This session seeks to interrogate borders and carcerality, beyond their often taken-for-granted status and connections, to better examine how they relate. It seeks to make space for thinking of borders through a carceral lens and the carceral through the lens of the border. Vitally, the session aims to push the very limits of border studies and carceral geographies beyond their implied linkage as spaces of physical bordering and the prison respectively. In doing so, we ask – what are the carceral characters of borders? How is carcerality present on the border? And in turn – locating carcerality beyond its typical spaces of concern – what different kinds of borders might be thought of as carceral? Can the ‘carceral’ border on new territory, where different kinds of borders – from the (air)port to the home – be thought of carcerally?

We invite papers that tackle questions concerned with carcerality of and/or on the border. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Borders and boundary crossings (e.g. considerations of various practices of migration)
• Negotiations of the prison boundary
• New territories of the carceral
• Scholarship that (re)considers the border of the discipline of (carceral) geography
• Scholarship that extends the boundary of existing work in carceral geography to case studies and empirical examples beyond the global north.

Please do not hesitate to get in touch regarding potential abstracts. We welcome scholars from across disciplines and career stages. The session will be held in online format.

Submission details: Please email submissions to Anna Schliehe (aks79@cam.ac.uk) and Jennifer Turner (jennifer.turner@uni-oldenburg.de), including paper title and abstract (max 300 words), name(s) and affiliation(s) by 28^th February 2021

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/

Call for Papers AAG 2016 San Francisco, CA

Carceral Geography: Conceptualising the Carceral

Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham) and Jennifer Turner (University of Leicester)

The ‘carceral’ exists both within and separate from the physical spaces of incarceration; it aligns with the conceptual framework of the ‘carceral turn’ as addressing ‘human experiences and social practices that involve systems of confinement [which] differ from those that a sociology of punishment can or perhaps should address’ (Brown 2014, 178). In this way, carceral geography contributes to an understanding of the carceral which ‘complicates and exceeds categories of criminality, penality and victimhood’ (ibid).

Carceral geography has already concerned itself with (experiences of) spaces of confinement very broadly conceived and operating at every scale from the global to the personal, and in this CFP we wish to explore the potential diversity of research in this arena. Although ‘incarceration’ has conventionally come to refer to the legal confinement of sentenced offenders under the jurisdiction of the state, by contrast the ‘carceral’ embraces the myriad ways in which persons could be, and indeed are, confined by other means; or indeed the means by which they could confine themselves. Whilst appreciating that such circumstances differ dramatically from each other, taking this more wide-ranging approach enables geography to interpret the ‘carceral’ as far exceeding imprisonment. Whilst including the conventional, state-sanctioned spaces of incarceration which hold sentenced prisoners, it also encompasses the spaces of detention of refugees, noncitizens, asylum seekers, the trafficked and the renditioned, as well as ‘forms of confinement that burst internment structures and deliver carceral effects without physical immobilization’ (Moran et al 2013, 240).

In this CFP we invite submissions whose intention is to move towards a conceptualisation of the carceral which exceeds conventional incarceration; considering the reach of the ‘carceral’ beyond spaces, practices and institutions of imprisonment.

Papers could consider topics including, but not limited to:

• theorisations of the carceral
• unlawful imprisonment, kidnap, abduction, curfew, grounding
• electronic monitoring, surveillance and securitized public spaces
• personal and nuanced forms of confinement
• mobile notions of the carceral inscribed upon the individual
• embodied stigma and corporeal practices which recall previous (conventional) incarceration

Submissions:

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Jennifer Turner (jt264@le.ac.uk) and Dominique Moran (d.moran@bham.ac.uk) by Friday 9^th October 2015.

Successful submissions will be contacted by 15^th October 2015 and will be expected to register and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 29^th 2015 ahead of a session proposal deadline of 18^th November 2015. Please note a range of registration fees will apply and must be paid before the formal submission of abstracts to AAG.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a new paper in the Designing Atmospheres Special issue of Visual Communication, co-authored with Dr Kimberley Peters (Aberystwyth University).

Unlocking carceral atmospheres: designing visual/material encounters at the prison museum

Using a variety of devices from visual displays, material objects, sensory engagements and embodied performance, museums select and narrate particular moments in history to an increasingly active audience. Thus far, focus on specific elements of museum design has eluded the altogether more pervasive, intangible and complex sensations designed, engineered, co-constituted and also arising unexpectedly from these sites: atmospheres. This article draws upon a particular museum experience – that of the prison museum – to interrogate how atmospheres are a key component of re-telling the past. Here, the authors explore the production and consumption of what they term ‘carceral atmospheres’. Focusing on two prison museums, the article explores how visitors unlock experiences of incarceration via the variety of atmospheric sensations calculated and provoked in these museum settings through visual/material manifestations and cues. The authors conclude that understanding atmospheric design is vital to gaining a deeper appreciation of how heritage sites function in the 21st century. Download a copy of the paper here.