Disavowing ‘the’ Prison

Armstrong, Sarah; Jefferson, Andrew M.

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-56057-5_9

Cited by 24 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The notion of porosity, on the other hand, focuses on the quality of the trail, the permeability of the landscape, and on the flows, fluids and qualities of the membrane, cognizant of the ways in which institutions are fused -politically, socially, symbolically, discursively and affectively. This resonates with criminological perspectives on carceral circuits (da Cunha 2008) and arguments that fluidity rather than fixedness is a fundamental quality of confinement (Armstrong and Jefferson 2017).…”

Section: From Fixed Boundaries To Porous Borderssupporting

confidence: 57%

Introduction

Weegels

Jefferson

Martin

2020

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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Recognizing that the ‘prison’ and the ‘street’ are increasingly understood to be enmeshed sites of exclusion and confinement, this introduction proposes an analytical orientation towards relations and practices across these sites, which attends specifically to the ways in which they are mutually constitutive. Utilizing notions of traversal and porosity, we push debates on confinement beyond their prison-centric impulse. This decentring of the prison goes beyond reading one site in terms of the other (the street as just another carceral space; the prison as another site of exclusion). We challenge the divisiveness of prison/street binaries and the domination of boundary-making by emphasizing the importance of polyvalent experiences and by drawing attention to the practices of people who traverse the prison/street threshold. On the basis of the fine-grained ethnographic contributions making up this collection, the introduction points towards novel avenues for a (grounded) theorization of confinement in terms of overlap, traversal and porosity.

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Section: From Fixed Boundaries To Porous Borderssupporting

confidence: 57%

Introduction

Weegels

Jefferson

Martin

2020

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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“…6. Relatedly, the tendency evident in popular consciousness and critical scholarship to reproduce fixed notions of 'the' prison has been critically analysed by Armstrong and Jefferson (2017).…”

Section: Hope / Abjectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement

Jefferson

Turner

Jensen

2018

Ethnos

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This Introduction to the special issue develops a theoretical argument around the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement by exploring the relationships between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and the like with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape. We explore how life is lived in and across these sites of confinement by focusing on the tactics of everyday life and hope while being mindful of how ever-present forms of abjection, even death are constitutive elements of these sites. Stuckness, from this inter-disciplinary perspective, is not simply a function of the spatial form it takes. Crucially, the argument goes, we need to understand how temporality animates stuckness as an important dimension of confinement. KEYWORDS Stuckness; confinement; mobility; temporality; prison; camp; ghetto Loic Wacquant has observed that there are 'striking similarities and intriguing parallels' between prisons and ghettos (Wacquant 2001). Wacquant explores how prisons and ghettos constitute a single, unified system and investigates the structural similarities between them. Others, often historians, have similarly considered different sites of confinement (ghettos, townships, camps, leper colonies, etc.) under a single frame (Brown & Dikkoter 2007). In this special issue we pursue a novel argument about the relationship between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and so on with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who are doing their utmost to cope or escape. Collectively, the articles gathered here contribute to a theoretical argument about the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement, while illuminating the subjective experience of confinement across different sites. 1 From a point of departure in anthropology and anthropological studies with important contributions from criminology, geography and philosophy, the contributions explore how life is lived in and across these sites of confinement by focusing on the tactics of everyday life and hope while being mindful of how ever-present forms of abjection, even death are constitutive elements of these sites.

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“…What does prison research hide? Two notions are signifi cant here: the first is the idea of the disavowal of prisons (Armstrong and Jefferson 2017), and the second that of a countervisual ethnography (Schept 2014). The former raises a methodological question -what happens if the prison is under erasure?…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carceral Entrapments

Bandyopadhyay

2020

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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This article focuses on three overlapping layers. First, it illustrates multiple and incoherent expressions of the prison/street nexus in India through fieldwork in prison and a para (urban neighbourhood). Second, it argues that existing categories of understanding prison/street porousness – such as a ‘deadly symbiosis’, a continuum, liminality and a carceral state – are inadequate for explaining these expressions of the prison/street nexus in India, which is framed within chaotic environments. Consequently, I argue, there is a poverty of concepts in narrating the prison/street nexus in the global south more generally, and it stems from methodological concerns. Third, the article unravels the methodological lessons from the study of imprisoned populations to examine how these may be used to narrate urban marginality. I take recourse to Lorna Rhodes’ illustration of ‘blind fields’ and ‘punctums’, to show how these may be used to disrupt conventional and hegemonic narratives of urban marginality.

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Disavowing ‘the’ Prison

Cited by 24 publications

References 24 publications

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement

Carceral Entrapments

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