Call For Papers - Special Session on Carceral Geographies: Unpacking the Carceral Continuum

Canadian Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, August 14-18, 2024, Hosted by the Department of Geography at Memorial University, St. John’s Newfoundland

Session Organizers: Sid Jackson (PhD), Kirsten Mcilveen (PhD candidate at University of British Columbia)

This session is seeking papers on the geographies of the carceral continuum understood as the network of institutions, spaces, and relations that contribute to containing, controlling, and punishing poor, disabled, and criminalized people (understood intersectionally as disproportionately made up of Indigenous, Black, disabled, queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans people, women, and migrants). The carceral continuum, a concept introduced by Foucault, looks at the diverse institutions that operate according to a carceral logic: shelters, rehab, the foster care system, psych wards, long-term care, migrant labour camps, detention, refugee camps, and black sites, etc. Palacias proposes the term “transcarceral continuum,” and gives the examples of mental health agencies, welfare, child protective services, as well as individualizing, pathologizing, and self-responsibilizing therapeutic programs.

Historically, the carceral continuum serves a colonial purpose with examples including systems of apartheid and segregation, reserves/reservations, residential and day schools, the sixties scoop, foster care, and internment camps. While the poor were subject to workhouses, orphanages, hospitals, work camps etc. Aside from discrete institutional spaces and typologies, carceral logics also operate in public space, through the system private property, and the bordered nation state. With the continuum, boundaries between the prison’s “outside” and “inside” are blurred, extending carceral control through stigmatization and the embodied markers of marginalization and institutionalization. The carceral then flows from one space to another in terms of common logic and common purpose with certain bodies flowing between sites, at times captive, at other times subject to continual forced displacement over the course of a lifetime. Thus, carceral spaces constitute sites and relations of power that securitize the systems of colonial-capitalism, targeting those non-compliant, excess, and excluded bodies. Bodies subject to carceral containment and relations often experience deep trauma and death as a result, and thus, an abolition movement has grown that envisions a de-carceralized world, a world of care and transformative justice, not punishment.

This session aims to solicit papers on carceral geographies within the carceral continuum including

• Spaces and practices of confinement and containment including specific institutions or institution types, public space, private property, and the nation state

• Carceral continuum theory

• Power structures and relations of the carceral (colonialism, capitalism, fascism, ablism, sexism, anti-Blackness, transphobia etc.)

• Abolition geographies, theories, and practices: envisioning a decarceralized world.

• Geographies of transformative justice

• Carceral histories

• Criminalization of poverty

• Disability, anti-Indigeneity, anti-Blackness, elders, youth (and intersections of) and carcerality

• Life histories of carceral containment

• The politics of trauma and the carceral experience

Please email your abstract to kmcilvee@capilanou.ca by May 15