Unlock the Volume: Towards a Politics of Capacity

In recent years “volume” has become a key analytic idea, and tool, for re‐imagining and making sense of historical and contemporary socio‐cultural and geopolitical phenomena. This paper argues that this important work could be pushed in new directions by thinking seriously of how volume might otherwise be interpreted spatially, as capacity. Accordingly, in this paper, we address what we call a “politics of capacity”. To do so, we draw specifically on debates in carceral geography and, in particular, the pressures on the prison system to illustrate our argument. Drawing on notions of “operational capacities” and “capacity building” in the prison setting, we outline a manifesto for volumetric thinking that moves beyond expressions of power that cut through height, depth and angles, to an understanding of how power is conveyed through maximum and minimum capacities; density and mass; and capacity‐building techniques.     

“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.     

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”.     

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.     

“Printed in the seventh year of the authors oppression”: debt,imprisonment, and the radicalization of Henry Adis

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the prison writings of Henry Adis. Writing from prison in the mid-seventeenth century, Adis rejects the status quo of the changing political regimes and develops a radicalized narrative persona that evolves throughout his prison writings, evolving from that of petitioning debtor to that of aggressive polemicist. This paper considers the effects of imprisonment on Adis’ polemic and then suggests that Adis’ radicalization is a response to a conflict with what he sees as a broken criminal justice system rather than a response to the emerging political and religious tensions that accompanied the Interregnum. Adis’ prison writings illustrate how the the seventeenth-century carceral experience could be formative to the counter-political movements of the period as much as a punitive measure against dissent.     

‘It’s a horrible,horrible feeling’: ghosting and the layered geographies of absent–presence in the prison visiting room

This paper advances geographies of absence by considering the multiscalar, overlapping, ambiguous and reciprocal absences inherent in incarceration, and the compound nature of the experiential and embodied absences characteristic of prison visiting. It progresses extant literatures by considering as absent a group which differs from those previously thus conceptualised, and by postulating absence even when whereabouts are known and co-presence is possible. Drawing on a major RCUK-funded study of the socio-spatial context of prison visitation in the U.K., it brings carceral geographies and geographies of absence into productive dialogue, demonstrating that attention to the felt presence of absence in the context of prison visiting is highly revealing of the poignant and bittersweet nature of family contact during incarceration.     

Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland,CA

This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place‐specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco‐based model of “tech gentrification” results in deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in the US as well. Treating Oakland as a “crossroads of theory”, this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors’ activist and empirical work, it contends that “thinking from Oakland” demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal.     

The coloniality of disaster: Race,empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico,USA

This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both “resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogestión, or autonomous organizing. It concludes that while resiliency can be coopted in service of a neoliberal recovery, it can also be the site for gestating new forms of sovereignty and new visions of postcolonial recovery.     

The Hudson River School of Incarceration: Sing Sing Prison in Antebellum New York

New York's Sing Sing Prison's first two decades coincided with the emergence of the Hudson River School of Painting. The differences between the two were dramatic: the Hudson River School emphasized an idealized “natural magnificence” whereas the prison extracted silent, profitable labor through routine beatings. Tourists and other visitors to the prison struggled to reconcile their expectations of the Hudson River with what they witnessed in the prison on its banks. Prison practices and the Hudson River School unexpectedly converged between 1844 and 1848, when phrenology simultaneously influenced the Hudson River School and prison reformers. Although its influence on the administration of the prison was short lived, the Hudson River School of Incarceration would have a lasting impact in the shift from religion to science in the administration of prisons.     

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.     

Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib1

This article presents a critique of prevailing left‐of‐center journalism and academic scholarship on the revelation of torture of Iraqi prisoners of war by United States military personnel at Abu Ghraib in the spring of 2004. We argue that the resulting discourse suffers from a certain critical bankruptcy in its failure to think about the nature of imprisonment as such. This failure is an effect of two procedures: (1) a narrowing of the field of inquiry that relies on the metonymic reduction of imprisonment through and as the practices of torture, and (2) a reification of the prison that both relies upon and displaces the racialization of imprisonment as an institution of black spatial containment and social control. In response, we call for a renewed understanding of and appreciation for the singularity of racial slavery and its afterlife in future research on carceral formations in and beyond the US.     

Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.     

Cultivating the Common Good at the Margins of the Commons: An Ethnographic Portrait of Transformative Pluralism in a High-Security Prison

ABSTRACT

Arising from an ongoing research project, this article presents an approach to religious and societal pluralism through ethnography. During a course convened inside a high-security prison, with a combined group of students currently resident in the prison and students currently studying in the University of Cambridge, participants and lecturers from diverse faiths and no faith explored concepts of citizenship and the common good. Bringing Rowan Williams’s proposals for “interactive pluralism” together with the transformative pedagogical framework of the course and its resonance with liberative theologies, I describe how the course participants co-created a space in which we were able to enact a transformative approach to the societal pluralism of which our gathering was a microcosm.     

The Prison and Power in Colonial Korea

This article explores the dynamics of the colonial prisons constructed by the Japanese and the power they wielded and projected as a dual project of modernisation and colonisation in Korea. Japanese colonialism and its disciplinary power made colonial prisoners docile subjects by utilising the mechanisms of close surveillance, scientific correction and ideological conversion while excluding and oppressing political offenders as “imperial others” through the exercise of cruel corporal punishment. The article offers an in-depth analysis of colonial modernity in Korea by examining how colonial power operated throughout the birth and evolution of the modern prison, and the mechanisms through which it governed Korean subjects in its prison system.     

These Bars Can't Hold Us Back: Plowing Incarcerated Geographies with Restorative Food Justice

Mass incarceration entrenches racial and class inequality and segregation. Before, during, and after low‐income people of color enter prison, they experience a range of barriers and biases that make it difficult to break out of the prison pipeline. This article investigates food justice and restorative justice activists in Oakland, California who are intervening at the point of reentry. I argue for the significance of teasing out the connections between food and carceral politics as a way to expand the practice and understanding of food justice. Specifically, I show how the incarcerated geographies of former prisoners, that is, perspectives and experiences that result due to the prison pipeline, motivate the formation of a restorative food justice. The associated healing and mutual aid practices increase social equity by creating spaces to overcome the historical trauma of mass incarceration, produce living wage jobs, rearticulate relationships to food and land, and achieve policy reforms.     

Disaster Capitalism and the Quick,Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life

Sea otters have barely survived centuries of colonial and capitalist development. To understand why, I examine how they have been oriented in capitalist social relations in Alaska, and with what effects. I follow sea otters through three overlapping political economic episodes, each of which shapes the next: colonial expansion and the fur trade; petro‐capitalism and the negligent neoliberal state, culminating in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill; and finally, spill cleanup and “green” capitalism, when sea otters are produced as data points and spectacle. In each episode, I describe (1) sea otters’ orientation in relation to capitalism and the state, and (2) the nature and temporality of violence and ecological loss that attends their orientation. In conversation with theorisations of extinction as a “slow unravelling”, I suggest animal life can unravel less slowly than haltingly—quick, quick, slow—and that the unravelling and animals’ orientation in capitalism are co‐constituted.     

Fanon's Mobilities: Race,Space, Recognition

This article engages with Frantz Fanon's writing on both geographical and dialectical movement. It suggests that in particular historical-geographical contexts—such as those described by Fanon himself—geographical patterns of mobility and confinement operate as the presupposition and result of “race”; while also functionally enabling capitalism's necessary and enduring dialectic of appropriation and capitalisation, and reproducing the Fanonian “zone of nonbeing”. More simply, this article suggests that in certain conjunctures the tight articulation of race, mobility, and capital accumulation inhibits the reciprocal recognition of equals. In those contexts, a spatialised “counter-ontological” politics is the only means of establishing intersubjective symmetry and the preconditions for Fanon's “new humanism”. This article concretises these arguments in relation to historical work on antebellum “carceral landscapes”. It concludes by drawing explicitly on Stuart Hall's reflections on articulation and “lines of tendential force” in order to think through the relevance of Fanonian theorisation today.     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

The origins of coastal ecological decline and the Great Atlantic Oyster Collapse

Changes to Earth systems threaten human and non-human sustainability because these changes undermine critical life support systems such as estuarine and coastal ecosystems (ECEs), which are in systematic ecological decline. This article investigates the root social causes of coastal decline through the case of serial collapses of the Atlantic oyster (C. virginica), starting in New York in 1810. The research triangulates two methods, inductive historical political economy, and a reading of archival newspapers from 1607 to 1900 interpreted through a framework informed by Marxian attention to the flow of capital and the stages of capitalist development. The historical research indicates that the community-oriented classical republicanism of Jefferson, lost to the rise of a liberal republicanism in the period after the Revolutionary War and the early 19th century. This shift initiated the first stages of American capitalism, called “original accumulation,” that caused the first collapse of the native oyster beds. As capitalism matured into the “production” phase, industrial harvesting and development in the ECE destroyed the cultivated beds. In the archives, oysters are consistently framed as a commodity, not a part of a living seashore with needs. Recurring discourses of an “inexhaustible” industry, competition between states, and even “oyster wars” highlight the importance of the oyster as a commodity. In stories about depletion, the narratives are limited to the source of oysters seed to New York, or micro-depletions that complain of a lost favored brand and the search for its replacement. The origins of Atlantic ECE decline are found in the development of Atlantic capitalism.