Carceral Space: Prisoners and Animals

This paper develops a framework for exploring resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies. I illustrate the close linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality and captivity focusing on three types of sites and institutions: the prison execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse; sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals; and sites and institutions of exploited prisoner and animal labor. The main themes that call for a “carceral comparison” among these sites include: the emotional and psychological strain and violence enacted on bodies that is interwoven into their day‐to‐day operations; their geographies (locations, design, and layout) and carefully regulated movements within them; relationships between carcerality and “purpose breeding” that extends across both nonhuman and human populations; the ways in which “animalization” of incarcerated bodies works to create conditions for social death and killability; and the legal and political contexts that produce certain lives as disposable “bare lives”.     

Carceral labour: Offshore work relations,conflicts and local participation in Ghana's oil and gas industry

Local participation is crucial for linking the oil and gas industry to broader economies. Direct employment in the oil and gas industry, albeit often on a limited scale remains critical for the transfer of expertise and know-how in many developing economies. Focusing on the social construction of carcerality – a set of spaces, practices and relationships, the paper examines the carceralities of non-prison places such as offshore oil and gas infrastructures. With emphasis on oil rigs and Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSOs) vessels, the paper highlights the complex labour relations, negotiations and conflicts in offshore working environment and its impacts on local content and participation in Ghana's oil and gas industry. The paper shows that carceral techniques operate to limit the potentiality of career progress. Offshore labour practices and relations show the new kinds of carceral spaces being created through offshore extraction, and sheds light on how these carceral spaces depotentialize the labour force and reinforce global political economic inequalities.     

Accompaniment Through Carceral Geographies: Abolitionist Research Partnerships with Indigenous Communities

This article approaches “ea”—a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) concept meaning life, breath, and sovereignty—as a vital mode of abolition ecologies, and proposes accompaniment as a methodology for mutual collaboration toward this endeavour. Research draws from ethnographic fieldwork on the Wai‘anae Coast of O‘ahu in Hawai‘i, a predominantly Native Hawaiian community, and reflects upon the author’s positionality on Wai‘anae’s insider–outsider borderlands. The argument is multifold: Carceral geographies inscribe racism by cleaving humans from the environment and each other, depriving life‐giving resources from populations deemed a threat to a dominant socioenvironmental order. At the same time, abolition ecologies entail worldmaking predicated on the interdependence of all life forces, employing syncretic practices that join disparate struggles, people, and places to generate possibilities greater than the sum of its parts. Accompaniment works against racism’s practices of criminalisation and containment while contributing to radical, syncretic placemaking as part of an expansive liberatory practice.     

The role of ex-paramilitaries and former prisoners in political tourism

Northern Ireland has a turbulent history, enduring 30 years of violence known as ‘The Troubles’. Streets in Belfast that were once ‘no-go’ areas are now popular tourist attractions. They are the sites of assassinations, attempted murders and memorials to the dead - both those killed and those who killed. This article reports back on interviews and focus groups with ex-prisoners and ethnographic walks, participating in guided tours of streets, memorial sites and cemeteries, led by former paramilitaries turned tour guides. These local, sometimes controversial, figures play a key role in Belfast's tourist industry, letting those at the very centre of the conflict present and represent the city's dark and contentious history. In this article, we argue that ‘Troubles tourism’ is not about glorifying or commodifying violence, as its critics have suggested (Northern Ireland Assembly, 2008; O'Doherty, 2016; Tinney, 2017), but rather, it enables the contested nature of the conflict to be understood by allowing competing discourses to co-exist and divergent positions to be tolerated, which is politically important for peace. As such, post-conflict tourism requires a different analytical approach than that currently offered in the ‘dark tourism’ literature, which often focuses on visitors' motivations and expectations, and the commodification of history. Instead, we suggest that increased attention be dedicated to the voices of those with previous experience of violence, and the potential of this to understand current ongoing struggle, as well as consider how tourism might contribute to community transition in a post-conflict context.     

When Druid went to jail: returned migrants,Irish prisoners,and Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming

Irish playwright Tom Murphy became Writer-in-Association with Druid Theatre of Galway, Ireland, in September 1983. The partnership began with Druid's production of Murphy's Famine (1968) in February 1984, and was followed by a lunchtime production of On the Outside (written in 1959 with Murphy's friend Noel O'Donoghue). Druid premiered Murphy's Bailegangaire (1985) in December 1985 and Conversations on a Homecoming in April 1985. Druid toured Conversations locally, nationally, and internationally for two and a half years. In February 1987, Druid presented the play at three Irish prisons. This article attempts to reveal how the prison audiences related to a play about a returned migrant; and to discover what prompted the professional company to perform in Irish prisons.     

Foucault,space and primary school dining rooms

This paper takes up recent debates within Children's Geographies as to the ‘usefulness’ of theory and its application to school dining rooms. The paper argues that in particular, Foucault's notions of governmentality have the potential to advance theoretical understandings of the spatiality of school dining rooms, the social relationships that occur within them and that in addition this can have relevant practical and policy implications that could impact upon the everyday lives of children that are both constituted by and constitutive of this space.     

Authoritarian power in space,time and exile

Autocrats have been shown to exert influence over their populations and dissidents abroad through strategies such as ‘transnational repression’ or ‘diaspora engagement’ policies, demonstrating that authoritarian power carries across borders. But existing work on extra-territorial authoritarian power has tended to view state power as a stand-alone variable that endows regimes with a relatively free hand to make their own diaspora policies. This is despite that studies of authoritarianism inside states, including those observing the ‘dynamics of contention,’ have consistently highlighted the relational and contingent nature of authoritarian power. This paper asks whether the iterative dynamics of contention that describe regime-opposition relations within state boundaries endure between authoritarian regimes and their exiles? It brings together the literatures on extra-territorial authoritarian power and the topology of power with that on contentious politics in authoritarian regimes to undertake a case study on the relationship between the Syrian government and the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. It finds that extra-territorial authoritarian is relational and contingent on the political context and its recipients, and shares many of the characteristics of authoritarian power inside state boundaries.     

From convicts to colonists: the health of prisoners and the voyage to Australia, 1823-53

From 1815, naval surgeons accompanied all convict voyages from Britain and Ireland to the Australian colonies. As their authority grew, naval surgeons on convict ships increasingly used their medical observations about the health of convicts to make pointed and sustained criticisms of British penal reforms. Beyond their authority at sea, surgeons' journals and correspondence brought debates about penal reform in Britain into direct conversation with debates about colonial transportation. In the 1830s, naval surgeons' claims brought them into conflict with their medical colleagues on land, as well as with the colonial governor, George Arthur. As the surgeons continued their attempts to combat scurvy, their rhetoric changed. By the late 1840s, as convicts' bodies betrayed the disturbing effects of separate confinement as they boarded the convict ships, surgeons could argue convincingly that the voyage itself was a space that could medically, physically and spiritually reform convicts. By the mid-1840s, surgeons took the role of key arbiters of convicts' potential contribution to the Australian colonies.     

Maya and their animals

Hamblin, Nancy L. Animal Use by the Cozumel Maya. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984. vii + 206 pp. including references and index. $23.00 cloth.     

新疆营盘人兽树纹罽袍的修复与保护

为了对新疆营盘出土的95BYYM 15号墓主人所着人兽树纹面罽袍的修复与保护,对之用微型手提式吸尘器除尘,局部污迹用纯三氯乙烯、药用棉签进行干洗,对服饰的组织结构与纹样进行分析.在此基础上,选用与之组织相近、纹理结构类似的带有横向凸条的真丝面料作为背衬材料,用缝线针法,主要是回针、铺针和行针对服饰进行修复.同时,对展陈的形式和道具制作作了有意的赏试,展出效果显著.     

Circulation,modernity, and urban space in 1960s Beirut

In this essay, I explore the role of circulation in Beirut’s urban space and society in the early 1960s. Drawing primarily from the Lebanese francophone newspaper L’Orient, I show how the rise of automobility in postcolonial Beirut brought with it the imposition of certain kinds of moral and civic geographies that prescribed how citizens should use and move through the city. I argue that the newspaper’s narratives about matters of infrastructure and traffic law abidance reveal concerns with not just how people moved through the city, but with the everyday configuration of a rational, modern, biopolitical order.