Pathways of confinement: the legal constitution of carceral spaces in France’s social housing estates

This paper analyzes the enactment and evolution of article L.126 of the Code of Construction and Housing (CCH) in France and demonstrates the careful ways lawmakers have redefined ‘common areas’ in social housing estates as carceral spaces. It argues that such transformation has inserted these areas into a ‘carceral continuum’ that facilitates the arrest, prosecution and confinement of young people ‘hanging out’ in ‘common areas’. Drawing on the work of legal geographers on the co-constitutive relationship of law and space, and urban and carceral geographers exploring the criminalization of urban space and the extension of the carceral state, the paper illustrates how the pathways of confinement are legally constituted. The legal process documented here seeks to highlight the law’s meaning-making capacity and the complex legal practices – by actors and institutions located at multiple scales – which significantly condition urban practices and relationships. The analysis suggests, finally, that law’s constitutive power has limits that are brought to the fore by anti-police violence struggles. Pathways of confinement are, thus, fragile networks dependent upon the ongoing enactments, discourses, and practices by lawmakers and law-enforcers.     

The Mediterranean as a carceral seascape

In May 2019, 75 distressed migrants fleeing Libya were rescued by the merchant vessel Maridive 601 in the central Mediterranean Sea. With Italy, Malta, and Tunisia denying permission to disembark, the merchant vessel turned from a floating refuge into an offshore carceral space, leaving the migrants stranded near the Tunisian coast for 19 days. This article traces the migratory trajectories of the Maridive 75, as I will collectively refer to them, in order to show how EUrope's desire to deter, capture, and contain migrant mobilities has transformed the Mediterranean Sea into a carceral seascape. While offshore carcerality is not specific to EUrope's southern maritime border and also not a novel phenomenon, increasingly restrictive migration policies have dramatically reshaped the Mediterranean borderzone over recent years, multiplying infrastructures, technologies, and spaces of confinement. Interrogating the Mediterranean Sea as a carceral space generates insights into an ever-growing panoply of carceral but mobile forms of governance seeking to discipline and police unauthorised and precarious human movements, both at sea and on land. At the same time, as this article demonstrates, unruly migrant mobilities and struggles at sea continue to expose the often-conflictual processes at work in the production of the Mediterranean carceral seascape.     

The folding of sport space into carceral space: On the making of prisoners’ experiences and lives

Sport and exercise are prominent activities in the daily routines of prisoners around the world, yet the spatial significance of these activities in carceral environments has not been deeply investigated. With a focus on the experiences of former federal prisoners in Canada, this paper addresses this scholarly gap by bringing together emerging trends in the literatures on sociology of sport, sports geography, and carceral geography to investigate the complex social meanings of prison sport and exercise. Specifically, we explore the folding of sports space into carceral space, often with the effect of reinforcing violent and exclusionary situations, but which also helps construct alternative spatial and temporal realities. Indeed, our overarching theoretical analysis considers how prisoners use sport to produce space in ways that assert a limited degree of agency over their daily lives and temporarily transcend their unpleasant conditions of confinement. By drawing from diverse theoretical frameworks and literatures, we advance novel arguments about the socio‐spatial significance of sport in prisons and raise some important questions for further research.     

Bosnia‐Herzegovina

Abstract

As a newly emerging sub-field within human geography, carceral geography offers a unique perspective and understanding of closed spaces. Reflecting this development, three types of closed institutions provide the background for this empirical paper. The nature and experience of these spaces of confinement are explored by using in-depth qualitative interviews with young women in Scotland. The focus on gender-/age-specific characteristics and physical and spatial features reveals the processes of being ‘locked up’, of the perception of confinement and emotional responses to prison, secure care and closed psychiatry. The young women's accounts of these closed institutions are seldom heard in discourses on crime and punishment, providing an in-depth insight into these otherwise enclosed spaces. Considering the geography of three carceral systems, this study extends beyond physical detainment and works towards an understanding of the carceral experience as an emplaced, gendered, embodied, emotional and often repetitive practice. This paper is based on a larger empirical study and uses selected results of this more extensive data to exemplify ‘the carceral’ in this particular context.     

‘Annamese Coolies’ at Australian Ports: Charting Colonial Geographies of Emotion,and Settler Memory,from French Vietnam to New Caledonia via Interwar Australia

In 1927, a ship carrying indentured Vietnamese workers travelled down the eastern coast of Australia on its way to New Caledonia. The movement of the Ville d’Amiens steamer through Australian waters sparked protests against alleged ‘French slavery’ and, eventually, moved politicians to recall the ‘injustice’ of the ‘pre-White Australia’ era. This article uses the Ville d’Amiens episode as a portal through which to explore the nexus between geographies of colonialism and of emotion. It argues that colonial and national power operated in pervasively ‘triangular’ ways, via the interplay of an affective triangle – of guilt, shame and pride – and a geo-political triangle – of French Vietnam, Australia and New Caledonia. Further, the article calls for greater exploration of the historical, geo-spatial contingencies of memory, motion and emotion.     

Linked (im)mobilities and the relational politics of movement in post-earthquake Nepal

ABSTRACT

This article highlights the importance of various (im)mobilities that were induced by the massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on 25 April 2015. It analyzes over 120 news articles published in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, arranging these into a mobility-centric narrative that highlights the politics of movement in the disaster’s wake. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological “mobilities turn”, I introduce the concept of linked (im)mobilities to demonstrate the complex dialectics structuring (im)mobilities after the disaster. More specifically, Nepal’s post-earthquake (im)mobilities intersected with one another and with a variety of geographic and political factors to produce a mutually constitutive web of contingent movements. Attending to these not only underscores the centrality of (im)mobilities themselves. By raising questions of scale, inequality, bordering, and “islanding”, the approach advanced here widens our analytical frame. It offers a conceptual architecture capable of encompassing more factors (beyond mobility), thereby facilitating a broader understanding of the disaster event and its various outcomes.     

‘We are of the connections’: migration,methodological nationalism,and ‘militant research’

Abstract

If there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility. The persistent reification of migrants and migration – even in critical migration studies –(re-)fetishizes and (re-)naturalizes the epistemological stability attributed to the (‘national’) state as a modular fixture of geopolitical space. In this regard, migration scholarship (however critical) is implicated in a continuous (re-)reification of ‘migrants’ as a distinct category of human mobility. Thus, the methodological nationalism that rationalizes the whole conjuncture of borders-making-migrants supplies a kind of defining horizon for migration studies as such. The dilemma of methodological nationalism has never been merely a problem of thought, however. It is indeed a manifestation of the veritable participation of researchers and scholars – whether consciously or unwittingly – in the very same sociopolitical processes and struggles through which the ‘national’ configuration of ‘society’ (or, the social field) is reified and actualized as the territorial expression of state power. Therefore, the questions of methodological nationalism and what might be called ‘militant research’ are deeply interconnected, indeed, mutually constitutive. As scholars of ‘migration’ – and above all, as practitioners of ‘militant research’ – we must attend to a self-reflexive critique of our own complicities with the ongoing nationalization of ‘society’. Hence, as researchers or scholars of migration, we are indeed ‘of the connections’ between migrants’ transnational mobilities and the political, legal, and border-policing regimes that seek to orchestrate, regiment, and manage their energies. We are ‘of’ these connections because there is no ‘outside’ or analytical position beyond them. The larger juridical regimes of citizenship, denizenship, and alienage configure us to be always-already located within the nexus of inequalities that are at stake in these conflicts.     

Disobedient objects: material readings of enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England

ABSTRACT

Responding to calls for scholars to address ‘material worlds’ in our analyses of protests past, the paper examines the more-than-human historical geographies of enclosure and enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England. It argues that negotiating enclosure – in the sense of both promoting and resisting private property rights – was dependent on particular assemblages of people, animals and things and their convergence within specific spaces and temporalities. Particular attention is paid to mundane and everyday objects entangled in enclosure protest and the ways these assemblages might transform objects’ meanings, rendering them threatening or disobedient. Moreover, repurposing these things offered opportunities to re-make space, concretising or resisting particular claims to access or possession at the local level. It contributed too to the ongoing debate out of which new concepts of property eventually emerged, so that interrogating the materialities of enclosure protest offers vital space in which to rethink the makings of our modern world.     

Cruisers in the City of Helsinki: staging the mobility of cruise passengers

Abstract

International cruise passengers moving in urban destinations have particular time limitation that can make enabling and disabling elements of mobility meaningful on the quality of their visit. Identifying these elements is essential to improve their independent movement. Based on a staging mobilities framework that considers the dimensions of physical settings, material spaces, design (PMD), social interactions (SI) and embodied performances (EP) in situ, the research has analysed location-specific information in Helsinki, a popular port of call in the Baltic Sea. The study has used go-along observations and mobile application in data collection. The produced dataset was analysed by combining GIS-methods and content analyses. As a result, five categories were identified under the dimension of PMD: wayfinding tools, unexpected situations, lack of rest spots and walkability. Categories identified under the dimension of SI were local people, service providers and travel companions, and other tourists. Categories identified under the dimension of EP were traffic behaviour, occasioned activities, sense of direction, planning, and time-related anxiety. Urban destinations such as Helsinki can apply these results in practice, to make the movement of independently moving cruise passengers as effortless as possible, contributing to a better experience of the city space for both tourists and other city users. The proposed methodology could also be used to analyse other mobility-related phenomena.     

“DOING TIME” IN CARCERAL SPACE: TIMESPACE AND CARCERAL GEOGRAPHY

By bringing debates over experiential time within human geography and criminology/prison sociology into dialogue with one another, this article draws attention to the imperative of considering time in the geographical study of incarceration. Informed by an understanding of space and time which sees them as analytically inseparable from each other, TimeSpace, it revisits existing empirical material previously generated through qualitative research within criminology and prison sociology, and identifies some potential synergies with human geography; in highlighting overlapping temporalities in a carceral context, and in demonstrating both the significance of perceived control over time, and the experience of the lifecourse, when past, present and future are viewed through “each successive now” in a context where (clock) time “moves on” but space is fixed.     

Princely longing for Europe: Constantine II Brâncoveanu's Mogoşoaia Palace (1702) and the creation of a European identity

Trapped among the Austrian, Russian and Ottoman empires, the reign of Constantin II Brancoveanu, Prince of Wallachia, was a constant balancing act between the West and the East. To further his political and cultural ambitions, Constantin initiated and supported an artistic movement, known today as the Brancovenesc style, of which his residence, the Mogosoaia Palace, stands as a prime example. The architecture and ornamentation of the palace makes use of elements from both Eastern – Byzantine and Ottoman – and Western – Renaissance and Baroque – European artistic traditions, merging them into an organic whole. The aim of this article is to explore the artistic strategies employed throughout the palace by arguing that they explicitly, as well as implicitly, construct an inclusive European identity. Starting from the premise that the palace acted as a place of cultural encounter between the East and West, the analysis will focus on how the decoration implies a space of transition through subjects such as metamorphosis and the double-headed eagle. Also, the importance given to spaces such as the entrance foyer and loggia suggests their role as critical spaces evoking the ambiguous concept of the parergon, which in turn challenges the emerging Enlightenment idea of the West as properEurope and the East as not quite Europe.     

Budgie smuggling or doing bird? Human-animal interactions in carceral space: prison(er) animals as abject and subject

Carceral geography, whilst in dialogue with many aspects of theory-building in contemporary human geography, including notions of affect, mobility and embodiment, has yet to meaningfully engage with animal geographies to consider the nonhuman dimension of carceral experience. Likewise, criminological scholarship of human-animal carceral co-presence has yet to progress far beyond the consideration of animals as mere ‘signifiers’ of human endeavour and meaning. Further, the study of prison animals has thus far considered only those nonhumans intentionally present in carceral space, such as therapeutic animals, eliding completely those considered ‘vermin’. This paper broadens the scope of extant scholarship, considering the parallels between the discourses of the ‘rehabilitation’ both of prisoners and prison animals during incarceration, and of both the prisoner and the prison animal as abject.     

ARCHITECTURAL MOVEMENTS,UTOPIAN MOMENTS: (IN)COHERENT RENDERINGS OF THE HUNDERTWASSER‐HAUS,VIENNA

This article explores some of the manifold entanglements of architecture and utopia. It takes as a case study a social housing block in Vienna: the Hundertwasser‐Haus. The house was designed by the artist‐architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser and has attracted enormous attention from the architectural press and tourists. I articulate a series of architectural “movements”, manifest in Hundertwasser's design philosophy, press reportage about the house, residents' experiences of living at the house, and visitors' activities outside it. I argue that from these movements, a series of essentially unconnected utopian “moments” emerged. The article makes two contributions. First, it builds upon gathering interest in the geographies of utopia – specifically by moving beyond an emphasis upon utopian hope. It locates utopian impulses that are imbued with euphoria and joy, and which are not beset by a sense of lack. It also provides empirical examples of “unsettling” utopias of different registers (such as textual and experiential). Second, the article contributes to recent geographical approaches to studying architecture. It uses the analytical motif of movements to gain a sense of how a material building – and the idea of that building – is constituted as much by tenuous relations and disjunctures (even non‐relations) as by relations. Whereas contemporary geographies of architecture do not leave room for tenuous relations and disjunctures in their narratives, this article tries to do so. It highlights how utopian moments at the Hundertwasser‐Haus are proximate to each other: they are located metaphorically and/or literally at the house. Yet those moments neither conform to a coherent, singular narrative, and in some cases, nor do they relate to each other. The article opens debate about the significance of non‐relational sociotechnical constituents to the geographies of architecture.     

Greening the Cage: Exploitation and Resistance in the (Un)Sustainable Prison Garden

The current popularity of prison greening coincides with a reformist project in carceral administration centring the “rehabilitation” and “transformation” of incarcerated people, finding a natural home in the prison garden. In contrast to mainstream literatures that celebrate reform and foreground recidivism, I argue that the prison garden is exploited institutionally for the symbolic power of “green” to help resolve a crisis of legitimacy in prisons, and thereby capitalism, depoliticising the violence of incarceration while reproducing the symbolic conditions of racial capitalism through two different socioecological (prison) fixes. This proceeds in strikingly similar ways to urban sustainable development, which regularly depoliticises and extends racial and spatial injustice across the city. Yet, in its tensions and contradictions, the (un)sustainable prison garden remains a space where radical possibilities can emerge through moments of resistance, constituting various tenets of a precarious carceral food justice praxis.     

Ethics Ex Machina: popular culture and the plural futures of politics

ABSTRACT

The articulation of ethical responsibility can be conceived as a condition of ethical practice that brings into being a human subject to whom we owe consideration, and the reverse must also hold: we are brought into being – subjectified – through these relational connections. But can these connections exist between human and non-human subjects? In this short paper, we analyse the representation of artificially intelligent machines in the popular television series Westworld and the movie Ex Machina and elaborate on the boundary between human and non-human as a complex and contested ethical space. We argue that taking popular cultural representations of machine learning seriously can offer significant insight into how futures of human subjectivity and ethicopolitical responsibility might unfold. (117 words)     

Deconstructing/Reconstructing Ethnicity

Abstract. Ethnicity is here viewed as a continuum, varying widely in terms of salience, intensity and meaning, along which several types of ethnicity can be distinguished. Domination ethnicity is where a nation imposes monocultural control – it can be regarded as a form of ethnicity. Enclosure ethnicity has three variants – dormant ethnicity, cultural confinement, and inward-looking ethnicity. Competition ethnicity competes over resources of the state and development. Finally, optional ethnicity is of low intensity and is light, volitional and fluid, as in the case of ethnic entrepreneurs and symbolic ethnicity. What is considered as well are the dynamics of ethnicity, shifting from one mode to another. The politics of ethnicity is here taken up in terms of emancipation and domination. Perspectives on ethnicity are framed by the changing meanings of ethnicity over time. The final question concerns the endgames of ethnicity, or the paths of change of different types of ethnicity, and how each relates to ethnic conflict regulation.     

Transmobilities: mobility,harassment, and violence experienced by transgender and gender nonconforming public transit riders in Portland,Oregon

This research endeavours to fill a conceptual gap in the social science literature on gender, public space, and urban mobilities by exploring how transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience public transit. Although previous research has surveyed gender minorities about harassment and discrimination in a range of environments, little is known about the quality or content of these experiences. Drawing from 25 interviews with transgender and gender nonconforming individuals in Portland, Oregon, this article finds that gender minorities experience frequent harassment while engaging with the public transit system. We articulate the concept of transmobilites to describe the ways that transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience a form of mobility that is altered, shaped, and informed by a broader cultural system that normalizes violence and harassment towards gender minorities. We conclude that gender minorities have unequal access to safe and accessible public transportation when harassment is widespread, normalized, and when policies prohibiting discrimination remain unenforced on urban public transit.     

Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A Geography of Revitalised Feminism in Social Media and Beyond

Has feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revitalisation: first, the creation of Destroy the Joint, a campaign launched and maintained in Facebook and Twitter spaces; and second, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech against sexism and misogyny in Parliament in October 2012. Both these moments, coming from political and public spaces, received worldwide interest, and we critically examine the context and ramifications of these instances while situating the institutional processes surrounding them within the growing feminist revitalisation. In so doing, we argue that these Australian‐based cases indicate a growing feminist movement that is open and multiply focused, connecting personal politics to public campaigning, and achieving material impacts. We conclude that developing a feminist geography of new media is a challenging task, as these spaces circumvent and renegotiate traditional spatial dimensions – including scale and place – through their dynamic networks. It is, nevertheless, a task worth doing.     

Piot,Personhood, Place and Mobility in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration of the nature of personhood through the medium of the concept of piot in the Lihir islands, Papua New Guinea. Piot is an embodied experience in response to the movement of others in space. When people leave or arrive at a place and spend the night, others in the area feel unwell. Piot is thus one aspect of the relations between persons. I suggest that ideas of relational personhood are inadequate to fully comprehend piot, and, following LiPuma (1998) and Clay (1986) rather than Strathern (1988), argue that persons in Lihir are more than just relational beings who always act with others in mind. Piot is predicated on the dual themes of fixed sociality and mobility that are important in Lihir as elsewhere in Melanesia (cf Eves 1998; Patterson 2002). Through piot, persons comment on and sanction the movement of others, yet this mobility still occurs.