Critical Carceral Geographies - Panel Discussion at NGM

The prison and what it stands for and how it works is part of much academic debate. As such, a growing body of literature, largely drawing upon theoretical insights from Foucault, Agamben and Goffman, investigates and discusses the spatialities and the related practices associated with sites of incarceration. At the same time, sites of incarceration that no longer serve their original function and are re-adapted for other uses - such as prison museums and historic hotels - have increasingly received academic attention. Consequently, not only practice and politics in carceral geographies but also the ways in which these are being re-used, represented, experienced and remembered have become objects of scrutiny.

Towards contributing to the study of ‘carceral’ and ‘post-carceral’ geographies, we welcome theoretical and empirical papers that engage with, but are not limited to, two broadly defined but interrelated topics:

Reconceptualising the 'carceral' and 'carceral spaces':

• The biopolitics of detention;
• Technologies of incarceration;
• Spaces of violence, custody and care;
• Control, surveillance and society;
• Prisons, asylums, camps and quasi-carceral spatialities.

‘Carceral spaces’ after the prison:

• Post-carceral politics of memory, forgetting and representation;
• Post-carceral geographies of tourism;
• Post-carceral heritage;
• The power of place: cultural histories of past spatialities of violence.